Guadiana

Guadiana is Durandarte’s squire in the enchanted company described in Don Quixote’s account of the Cave of Montesinos. Merlin transforms him into a river after grief at being separated from his master drives him beneath the earth. The metamorphosis gives a sorrowful, loyal attendant a lasting presence in the landscape, while the cave narrative itself remains deliberately uncertain: its narrator records the extraordinary story without deciding whether it is true.

Identity and Enchantment

Guadiana belongs to the group Merlin has kept enchanted for more than five hundred years, including Durandarte, Belerma, and Ruidera with her daughters and nieces. Unlike those companions, Guadiana is changed into a river bearing his own name. The transformation preserves his identity while making it geographical: he remains the sorrowing squire, but his body and journey become part of the natural world.

Grief and the River’s Course

Montesinos explains that Guadiana mourned Durandarte’s fate and was transformed into a river. When he reached the surface and saw the sun of another heaven, the realization that he was leaving Durandarte overwhelmed him; he plunged back into the earth. Yet he cannot escape the course of his nature. From time to time he emerges to the sun and the world, and the waters of the Lakes of Ruidera, together with other streams, carry him onward in a grand entrance into Portugal.

The river’s movement retains the squire’s melancholy. Wherever it goes, it displays sadness rather than pride, producing coarse, tasteless fish instead of the choice fish associated with the golden Tagus. The account makes landscape an extension of feeling: Guadiana’s grief does not end with his transformation but marks the river’s intermittent appearance, direction, and character.

Companions and Shared Fate

Guadiana’s story is bound to Durandarte’s enchantment and to the tears of Ruidera’s family. Montesinos says that Merlin changed Ruidera and her daughters and nieces into lakes out of compassion for their weeping. Those lakes then send their waters to Guadiana, linking the companions’ separate transformations in one continuing course. The squire’s river is therefore both an individual memorial to separation and part of a larger enchanted geography connecting the lost company.

Story, Uncertainty, and Afterlife

Guadiana reaches the reader through Don Quixote’s report of what he saw in the cave and Montesinos’s account within that vision. The narrator later questions whether the cave adventure could have happened as described, but declines to certify it as either true or false; he also reports that Don Quixote was said to have admitted, near death, that he invented it. The uncertainty leaves Guadiana poised between legendary explanation and comic invention rather than establishing the river’s origin as historical fact.

The cousin treats the tale as useful knowledge. He says that learning the transformations of Guadiana and the Lakes of Ruidera will serve his planned Spanish Ovid, and he counts the discovery of the river’s previously unknown source among the benefits of traveling with Don Quixote. The episode thus gives Guadiana two afterlives: within the story, as a grieving squire carried through the world as a river; and within the cousin’s scholarship, as an explanation to be turned into a book.