Lakes of Ruidera

The Lakes of Ruidera are both a landscape Don Quixote intends to explore and the setting for an explanation that turns geography into enchantment. In Montesinos’s account, the lakes are the tears of Ruidera and her family, transformed by Merlin; their waters flow into the Guadiana, joining a chain of marvels that links the underground world to the visible landscape of La Mancha.

A destination for investigation

After four days of hospitality at Don Diego de Miranda’s house, Don Quixote asks leave to resume his travels. He says that he wants to seek adventures in the neighbourhood while waiting for the jousts at Saragossa, and names two related goals: entering the Cave of Montesinos and investigating the origin and true source of the seven lakes commonly called the Lakes of Ruidera. The lakes thus begin as a geographical mystery that the knight proposes to examine, not merely as scenery along his route.

Don Diego and his son Don Lorenzo commend his decision and offer him whatever he may need from their household. Sancho Panza, by contrast, is reluctant to leave a house where food is abundant for the lean provisions of travel. The contrast makes the departure practical as well as imaginative: the lakes belong to the onward journey that Don Quixote embraces and Sancho expects to endure.

Montesinos’s explanation

In the account associated with the Cave of Montesinos, the lakes receive an enchanted origin. Montesinos tells Durandarte that Merlin has kept him and many companions under enchantment for more than five hundred years, without any of them dying. Ruidera, her seven daughters, and two nieces are the exception to their continued presence in the enchanted company: moved by compassion for the tears they shed, Merlin transformed them into lakes. Montesinos identifies these waters in the living world as the Lakes of Ruidera, in the province of La Mancha.

The transformation makes grief visible in the landscape. The lakes are not an incidental detail in Montesinos’s speech: they preserve the tears of named mourners and give their sorrow a form that remains in the world above. The tale folds family ties, the passage of centuries, and the local geography into one account, so that a place Don Quixote had meant to investigate becomes evidence, within the vision, of an ancient enchantment.

The lakes and the Guadiana

Montesinos connects the lakes to another transformation. Durandarte’s squire, Guadiana, is changed into a river while lamenting his master’s fate. On reaching the surface and seeing the sun, he is overcome by grief at leaving Durandarte and plunges underground. Because he must still follow his natural course, he emerges from time to time; the Lakes of Ruidera send him their waters, along with other streams, and he carries them onward into Portugal.

This account gives the lakes a role in a continuous movement between concealment and appearance: their waters feed a river that vanishes beneath the earth and intermittently returns to view. The resulting landscape is at once recognizable as the source-region Don Quixote wants to investigate and transformed by the story into the outward trace of Merlin’s spell, Ruidera’s tears, and Guadiana’s enduring sorrow.