Consuegra

Last Sunday I had a lovely one-day excursion with Helena, her family and her friends to a village called Consuegra (it’s around 60 km away from Toledo to the South). The place is known for the windmills of Don Quixote: in one episode of Cervantes’ famous novel Don Quixote arrived to this place to fight the windmills, which he thought were giants. :) I don’t really know how the story ends, but the place looks beautiful: basically the village lies right next to a hill and on the top there are 12 very nice white windmills (each of them named after a character from the book) and a castle. And of course the view is amazing.

First we went to visit one of the windmills, there watched a video of how the flour used to be grained and also - to my surprise - I learnt that the mills were designed in a way that it is possible to turn the roof around to "adjust" it better to the wind.

Don Quixote greeted us at the entrance :)

Inside

View from the mill

Then we participated in a theatrical tour in the castle. This was great fun, there were 4 actors dressed up in authentic clothes and they were guiding us around, but interactively: for example at one point we all received wooden swords and they taught us how to "fight". Then at another scene we all had to bow when the king entered the room. :) I enjoyed it a lot, although sometimes they spoke “ancient” Spanish, so I couldn’t understand much of these parts.

After this we had a nice picnic, as the weather was very sunny and then decided to go for a walk in a forest nearby to hear the rutting of the deer. We could hear some noises, but we didn’t see any deer unfortunately. But I enjoyed the landscape too, it was different from the surroundings of Illescas and also from the forests we have in Hungary.

Lights at the end of the day :)