The words starting Don Quixote are perhaps the best known in Spanish. This "Place in La Mancha, whose name I do not remember" was a puzzle to all readers. Although it does not have to be resolved to enjoy the work considered the masterpiece of Spanish literature, this has always irritated the scholars’. At least so up to now. A multidisciplinary team from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid has made a relatively plausible hypothesis: Villanueva de los Infantes. In the study El lugar de La Mancha es... El Quijote como un sistema de distancias/tiempos [The place in La Mancha is... Don Quixote as a system of distances/times] ten experts from the centre appl

  The novel might have started in any way, but Cervantes chose to omit the name of the main character’s birthplace. In its place, he decided that the first sentence of Don Quixote had to start with “Somewhere in La Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember...”. Little is known about why the writer refused to reveal the name of the town where Don Quixote was born. What we do know is that the result of his decision was that, since the book was published, many villages in La Mancha have disputed the honour of being the home place to one of the most illustrious characters of universal literature.    In some, the local authorities and