It would be going too far to say that no one can thoroughly comprehend Don Quixote without having seen La Mancha, but undoubtedly even a glimpse of La Mancha will give an insight into the meaning of Cervantes such as no commentator can give.
Of all the regions of Spain it is the last that would suggest the idea of romance. Of all the dull central plateau of the Peninsula it is the dullest tract.
There is something impressive about the grim solitudes of Estremadura; and if the plains of León and Old Castile are bald and dreary, they are studded with old cities renowned in history and rich in relics of the past.
But there is no redeeming feature in the Manchegan landscape; it has all the sameness of the desert without its dignity; the few towns and villages that break its monotony are mean and commonplace, there is nothing venerable about them, they have not even the picturesqueness of poverty; indeed, Don Quixote’s own village, Argamasilla, has a sort of oppressive respectability in the prim regularity of its streets and houses; everything is ignoble; the very windmills are the ugliest and shabbiest of the windmill kind.
To anyone who knew the country well, the mere style and title of “Don Quixote of La Mancha” gave the key to the author’s meaning at once. La Mancha as the knight’s country and scene of his chivalries is of a piece with the pasteboard helmet, the farm-labourer on ass-back for a squire, knighthood conferred by a rascally ventero , convicts taken for victims of oppression, and the rest of the incongruities between Don Quixote’s world and the world he lived in, between things as he saw them and things as they were.