Expat Travel Mom

Some literary obsessions just stick with you. In college, I took a four-semester course called Seminar, working straight through the classics into modern literature, and Don Quixote was one of the ones that never let go of me. Analyzing it, laughing through it, sitting with everything it's actually about underneath the comedy, it became one of those books I've carried with me ever since. 

A Sign, Literally, on the Wall

When we first walked through the house we ended up buying here in Spain, there was a traditional tile piece on the wall depicting Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. I was sold the moment I saw it. It felt like a sign, the good kind, the kind you don't question, you just accept.

Finally Seeing the Windmills

So on a road trip from Valencia to Madrid, we took a slight detour to actually see the windmills ourselves, the real ones, or at least, the ones this whole legend is built around. Miguel de Cervantes wrote Don Quixote in the early 1600s, the story of an aging nobleman who reads so many chivalric romance novels that he loses his grip on reality and sets out to become a knight-errant himself, accompanied by his loyal, long-suffering squire, Sancho Panza. In the novel's most famous scene, Don Quixote spots a row of windmills on the horizon, convinces himself they're giants, and charges at them on horseback, lance first, with exactly the outcome you'd expect. It's where we get the phrase "tilting at windmills," still used today for anyone fighting a battle that was never really there to begin with.

These windmills sit across the region of Castilla-La Mancha, the actual landscape Cervantes had in mind while writing, and walking up to them in person brought every memory of reading that book flooding back at once. There's something genuinely moving about standing where a piece of literature that old still physically exists, wind gusting hard enough that you can almost understand how a man convinced himself these were monsters. And yes, we posed with the legends themselves, exactly the way you're supposed to. The location we went to was here, but you'll read below that there's another, bigger one as well.

If You Want More Than We Got

We stopped at a smaller, quieter site, easy to fold into a road trip without much of a detour at all. If you want the fuller version, Consuegra is the place, twelve windmills lined up along a ridge above the town, one still fully functional, plus a medieval castle right next door and small shops and cafes built into a couple of the windmills themselves. We didn't make it there this time, but it's on the list, although it sounds more touristy.

The Black Bulls Watching Over the Highway

If you've ever driven from Valencia toward the interior of Spain, or really anywhere across the country, you've almost certainly spotted them: massive black bull silhouettes standing on hilltops, watching over the highway. People always wonder about them, so here's the story.

They started in 1956 as a straightforward advertisement, commissioned by the Osborne sherry and brandy company, founded all the way back in 1772, to promote their Veterano brandy. Artist Manolo Prieto sketched the design, a simple black silhouette of a fighting bull, and by the 1970s, over 500 of these giants stood across the Spanish countryside, some as tall as 14 meters, branded in bold red lettering with the Osborne name.

Then, in 1988, new advertising laws banned roadside billboards entirely, and the bulls were suddenly at risk of coming down for good. Osborne's solution was simple: they painted over their own name, leaving only the pure black silhouette behind. For a while, that compromise worked. But by 1994, officials pushed to remove the bulls entirely anyway, arguing that the shape alone was still recognizable enough to count as advertising. That's when something remarkable happened, the Spanish public pushed back, hard. These bulls had stopped being an ad campaign in anyone's mind by that point, they'd become a genuine symbol of the country itself. The backlash worked, and in 1997, Spain's Supreme Court ruled the bulls could stay, protected now as cultural landmarks rather than commercial signage.

Today there are still around 90 of them standing across Spain, and once you know the story, you can't help but watch for the next one on the horizon.

Albacete, La Mancha's Best Kept Secret

We also stopped in Albacete, and it's the kind of place almost nobody thinks to pull off for, which is exactly what makes it worth mentioning. Small, cute, genuinely pretty, a beautiful park, adorable little streets, and, fittingly for this whole detour, some of the best cheese in the country.

Albacete is actually one of only four provinces in Spain legally allowed to produce true Manchego cheese, alongside Toledo, Ciudad Real, and Cuenca, protected under strict European origin rules since 1984. Cheesemaking here traces back as far as the Bronze Age, made from the milk of Manchega sheep specifically, no substitutes allowed under the designation. And yes, Cervantes himself wrote Manchego cheese right into Don Quixote, so in a strange way, stopping here closes the loop on the whole detour, giants, bulls, and the cheese the knight himself would have actually eaten.

Here's to your road trip, wherever it may take you, and discovering those hidden gems along the way!