Walking down the city centre of Madrid I arrived in Spain Square. The spot I had in mind to capture in some photos was crowded with Tourists taking tons of selfies. Therefore, before raising my mobile phone and its camera I had to wait a bit.
Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are there in front of a Cervantes with an hard expression staring at the infinite. So many stories and allegories are in that book written more than four hundred years ago. The wind mills Don Quixote and Sancho Panza fought against probably are not so different from the everyday life difficulties we have to cope with.
Who was Cervantes? He was a man that had a hard life. In his youth he was a soldier. He had to fight the dreadful battle of Lepanto against the Ottomans where he lost one arm. Once getting back to Spain after the battle, he was kidnapped and jailed by the pirates in Algieri. He tried to escape many times without success until his family payed the requested ransom.
Once he got back home, he had to survive with humble jobs until his debut as a writer when almost close to the end of his life. A guest of him described the writer as “old, soldier, gentlemen and poor”.
When he died he was conscious that his book, Don Quixote, was already a great success translated in different languages.
As for many other big names or art and literature, that lived in poverty, his works become so popular that nowadays are well known all over the world, he has an institute of Spanish culture named after him and more than one statue in the capital of Spain, Madrid.
I looked that Don Quixote and that Cervantes thinking at the adventure and misadventures of both, the first one imaginary and the second real.
Springtime spreads and sun shines on the lands of Spain. With this inspiration, I promise myself to prepare, sooner or later, a photographic path in the Mancha region in a Country, Spain, that conquered me since the first time I landed there.
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