Made out of people

Toledo, La Mancha, Madrid

I´ve meditated on literature as a driver for tourism before, in my discussion of Elsinore. It didn´t apply to Seville, but it certainly does to La Mancha and (I now realize) to Granada.

You see, La Mancha -- as a province -- is boring. It´s large, it´s flat, it´s dry and dusty. It´s the sort of place where a tired old man might push his ancient horse across the flat plains and, out of sheer eagerness and the heat of the day, imagine giants where only windmills stand. It was the genius of Cervantes--expat, traveller, criminal, refugee-- to realize this and to lay it out in a massive epic, incidently creating the modern novel on his way.

La Mancha has, in turn, taken Don Quixote under wing. A scribble of an old man and his horse (by Picasso) is all but the official symbol of the region, and appears on a wide variety of La Manchan paraphenalia.

Something slightly different happens in Granada. While now a tourist site on its own merits, it was kicked off by Washington Irving (or was it Irving Washington¹?) who, while touring Spain, decided that the Alhambra looked pretty cool and moved in. He then wrote a travelogue documenting his adventures, which in turn brough others there.

(... and Toledo, and future plans, in the extended entry ... )

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¹ Bonus points if you recognize this completely irrelevant reference.

I should probably mention Toledo, too. Toledo is in La Mancha, but isn´t quite so boring. Indeed, it´s a major tourist trap: some come for the El Greco paintings that decorate the cathedral, the museum, and the El Greco House; some for the marzipan and wild game; some for the Jewish quarter; and some for the fine Spanish steel for which the town is known. And so everywhere there are swords in display windows. Replicas, models, reconstructions, new designs; swords with skulls and knives and all sorts of things.

And now there is a good movie tie in. Many sword windows record that they sell the official jewelry for the Lord of the Rings Sword-and-Jewelry collection. Get all five (I think) swords and all the various rings (Aragorn´s, the One Ring, etc).

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I´m now back in Madrid, which seems less cursed this time. (My first time in Madrid, my camera broke and I got sick. My second time in Madrid, I missed a train. Third time, fortunately, seems the charm). I catch a plane out tomorrow afternoon: Madrid to Heathrow, then a red-eye to Kenya. Where they have lions and tigers.