Museo Casa Natal de Cervantes
Bronze sculptures of Don Quijote and Sancho Panza sitting on a stone bench let you know you have arrived at the supposed birthplace of Spain’s greatest writer. Their knees are polished by the hands of all the visitors who have posed for photographs between them. Miguel de Cervantes was born in Alcalá de Henares in 1547 and lived here briefly as an infant. In the 1940s, scholarly research suggested that this handsome house may have been his family home, and the city moved quickly to reconstruct it as a museum, following the model of the equally tenuous Museo del Greco in Toledo. It is nonetheless an interesting and enjoyable look at the life of a prosperous family in Golden Age Spain. Cervantes’ father was a barber-surgeon, and you can see a period barber’s chair and a brass basin of the kind Don Quijote famously insisted was an enchanted helmet. A small museum upstairs displays Cervantes’ great book in various editions and languages. (See “In Search of Don Quijote".)
Bronze sculptures of Don Quijote and Sancho Panza sitting on a stone bench let you know you have arrived at the supposed birthplace of Spain’s greatest writer. Their knees are polished by the hands of all the visitors who have posed for photographs between them. Miguel de Cervantes was born in Alcalá de Henares in 1547 and lived here briefly as an infant. In the 1940s, scholarly research suggested that this handsome house may have been his family home, and the city moved quickly to reconstruct it as a museum, following the model of the equally tenuous Museo del Greco in Toledo. It is nonetheless an interesting and enjoyable look at the life of a prosperous family in Golden Age Spain. Cervantes’ father was a barber-surgeon, and you can see a period barber’s chair and a brass basin of the kind Don Quijote famously insisted was an enchanted helmet. A small museum upstairs displays Cervantes’ great book in various editions and languages. (See “In Search of Don Quijote".)
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