Consuegra is a town of about 10,000 in Castilla-La Mancha, and if you are travelling through Don Quixote country, this is the stop to make. Twelve restored windmills stand in a row along a ridge above the flat plains, white against the sky, with a Moorish castle at one end — the Castillo de la Muela — completing a scene that looks almost too perfectly composed to be real. Cervantes scholars debate whether these are the actual windmills Quixote charged at (they argue for Mota del Cuervo or Campo de Criptana), but Consuegra's ridge is the most visually dramatic and the one that lodges in the memory.
The castle itself is well worth exploring, with panoramic views over the orange and ochre landscape that stretches unbroken in every direction. If you can time a visit to late October, the town's saffron festival celebrates the harvest of this intensely labour-intensive spice — it takes around 150,000 hand-picked crocus flowers to produce a single kilogram — and the plains around Consuegra have been growing it since the Moorish era. Outside town, the ruins of the great Roman dam — which gave way in 1891 and drowned much of Consuegra — make a quietly moving short walk.