Centenary Paper: Bulls, Dwarfs, and a Touch of Cervantes

‘El Callejón’, arguably the finest restaurant in La Mancha’s biggest city, Albacete, is a shrine both to bullfighting and Don Quixote . Points of connection between the two iconic images of Spain are limited, although both employ cruelty as an aesthetic device and have long been championed in La Mancha as matters of regional as well as national pride. To coincide with the 300-year centenary of the publication of the first part of Don Quixote , the writer José Martínez, ‘Azorín’, received a commission to write a series of newspaper chronicles in which he retraced the steps of Cervantes’s protagonists. Journalist and writer Jorge Bustos completed a travelogue of the same route in 2015 to coincide with the fourth centenary celebrations for part two of the Quixote . My quixotic sally in summer 2022 came about by accident rather than design following a journalistic commission to cover what may turn out to have been the final comic bullfight to feature dwarfs in the Peninsula: the experience inadvertently inspired me to reflect on changing practices in and perceptions of Spain as viewed through the lens of arguably the first European novel and an archaic bloody spectacle (long known as the ‘national fiesta’).