Calle de Atocha 87: Where Don Quixote Was Printed
Why is it significant?
Stand opposite number 87 and look for the plaque on the facade. It is an ordinary building on a busy street, but in the early 1600s this was a printing shop, full of ink, damp paper, wooden presses and men setting type letter by letter.
Key Facts
| Place | Calle de Atocha 87: Where Don Quixote Was Printed |
|---|---|
| Address | Calle de Atocha 87, 28012 Madrid, Spain |
| Geo Coordinates | 40.41150, -3.69710 |
| Part of Walk | Madrid's Barrio de las Letras: Cervantes, Lope de Vega & the Writers' Quarter |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand opposite number 87 and look for the plaque on the facade. It is an ordinary building on a busy street, but in the early 1600s this was a printing shop, full of ink, damp paper, wooden presses and men setting type letter by letter.
This was the workshop of Juan de la Cuesta, and at the end of 1604 its presses were busy with a new book by a writer in his late fifties with a long record of failure: The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha. It went on sale in early 1605. Within months it was being reprinted, pirated in other cities and read aloud to people who could not read at all.
The first edition was produced in a hurry, and it shows. In one chapter, Sancho Panza's donkey is stolen... and a few pages later Sancho is riding it again, with no explanation. Readers noticed. Ten years later, in the second part of the novel, Cervantes had his characters discuss the mistake themselves, blaming the printer, the author, anyone at all. It is one of the first times a novel argued with its own readers.
The same press printed the second part in 1615. By then a rival writer hiding behind a false name had published his own fake sequel, and Cervantes, furious, made his real Don Quixote mock the impostor inside the story. Literary piracy, fan fiction and a public feud, all four centuries ago, all starting from this address.
Today the building houses the Sociedad Cervantina, devoted to keeping the memory of Cervantes alive, so the place where Don Quixote was born still belongs to him. For the last stop, climb back north through the quarter to Calle de Cervantes and find number 11. There, behind a plain door, lives the house and garden of the man who called Cervantes the worst poet in Spain.