Ruidera

Ruidera is a duenna in the enchanted company described by Montesinos, whose story gives her an unusual fate: she and her female relatives are transformed into lakes in La Mancha. Her brief appearance connects a personal lament and a long-standing enchantment to a landscape that, within the tale, preserves the company’s history.

Identity and place in the legend

Montesinos names Ruidera among those whom Merlin has kept enchanted for many years, alongside Durandarte, Belerma, and Guadiana. She is identified as a duenna and as a member of this group of companions and acquaintances. The account also includes her seven daughters and two nieces, extending the enchantment across her family.

Enchantment and transformation

The company has remained under enchantment for more than five hundred years, and Montesinos says that none of them has died. Ruidera and her daughters and nieces are the exception to their companions’ continued presence in the enchanted company: Merlin transforms them into lakes because of the tears they shed. The story thus gives their grief a lasting form rather than presenting their fate as an ordinary death.

The lakes and the story’s frame

Montesinos identifies the resulting waters with the Lakes of Ruidera, which he says are known by that name in La Mancha in the world of the living. Ruidera’s transformation therefore makes her name part of the geography through which the tale is remembered. Her history reaches the reader within Don Quixote’s account of the wonders Montesinos showed him; Don Quixote insists that he saw and touched what he describes, while the episode remains framed as a marvel of enchantment.