Peña Pobre becomes the setting for Don Quixote’s deliberate reenactment of a chivalric romance: rather than pursue a new feat of arms, he withdraws to perform a lover’s penance. The place matters because its isolation allows him to turn literary imitation into a sustained personal ritual, while his choice of model keeps that ritual from becoming uncontrolled destruction.

The Romance Behind the Place

Don Quixote selects Peña Pobre as the place to imitate Amadis of Gaul, whom he presents as the foremost model for knights-errant. In Amadis’s story, rejection by Oriana led him to withdraw to Peña Pobre under the name Beltenebros and endure his grief there. Don Quixote considers this precedent especially suitable: penance in the wilderness is easier for him to imitate than legendary feats such as defeating giants, dragons, or armies.

A Setting for Chosen Penance

The landscape serves as a stage for a performance Don Quixote plans rather than a retreat forced upon him by events. He explains to Sancho Panza that the location is well suited to his purpose, and proposes to play the despairing madman. Once alone, he climbs a high rock and reconsiders whether to imitate Roland’s violent madness or Amadis’s melancholy withdrawal. The contrast makes the setting a place of choice: the same imagined heartache could prompt havoc, or be expressed through patient, literary devotion.

Prayer, Verse, and Restraint

Don Quixote decides that copying Roland would be unjust to Dulcinea of Toboso, since he has no reason to suppose she has been unfaithful. Amadis offers a more fitting pattern: Don Quixote can grieve over separation without damaging trees or disturbing the streams. He makes a makeshift rosary from a strip torn from his shirt, ties eleven knots in it, and recites prayers. He also writes and carves verses in the sand and on tree bark, many expressing sadness or praising Dulcinea; only some can be read when the site is later encountered. Peña Pobre thus holds the traces of a penance that converts imagined romantic suffering into prayer and poetry rather than injury to the surrounding world.