The birthplace of Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote, stands on Calle Mayor and has been carefully restored and furnished as a museum representing a prosperous sixteenth-century household. Cervantes was born here in 1547 and the rooms are filled with period furniture, household objects, and books of the era — creating an impression of what domestic life looked like in golden-age Spain. Explanatory panels in Spanish and English tell the story of Cervantes' life and work.
The museum is modest in size but well done, and the setting on the colonnaded main street gives it considerable atmosphere. Outside, statues of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza mark the entrance — two of the most recognisable fictional characters in world literature, born in the imagination of a man from this narrow Castilian city. The birthplace is free to enter, which is one of the more unusual features of a UNESCO-listed cultural monument.
story: "Cervantes had a turbulent life that fed directly into his fiction. He fought at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571 and was shot in the left hand, permanently disabling it. On his way home, he was captured by Algerian pirates and held as a slave in Algiers for five years until his family scraped together a ransom. He didn't begin writing Don Quixote until he was in his fifties, imprisoned in a Spanish jail for an unrelated debt dispute."