Mota del Cuervo: The Windmills on the Balcony of La Mancha
Drive across the plain of La Mancha towards the small town of Mota del Cuervo, in the south-western corner of Cuenca province, and the windmills announce the place long before the houses do. Seven whitewashed towers stand along the crest of a rocky hill above the rooftops, their dark sail crosses turned to an enormous sky. The hilltop is known as the Balcón de La Mancha, the Balcony of La Mancha, because from up there the plain seems to run away flat in every direction until it dissolves into haze. Few places explain so quickly, and so beautifully, why this region became windmill country.
A balcony over an endless plain
La Mancha is one of the great tablelands of inland Spain: high, dry, sun-hammered in summer and raked by wind for much of the year. Its rivers are few and unreliable, which meant that the water mills that ground grain elsewhere in Europe could never fully do the job here. Where water failed, wind did not. The hill at Mota del Cuervo is modest in absolute terms, but on a plain this flat even a modest rise becomes a grandstand. From the mills the view sweeps over vineyards, olive groves and cereal fields stitched together in ochre and green, and on clear days it carries far towards the neighbouring provinces, for the town sits close to the point where Cuenca, Toledo and Ciudad Real meet. Stand up there in the evening, when the low sun sets the whitewash glowing and the wind pushes steadily against your back, and the local name needs no further explanation. This is a balcony in the most literal sense: a place built for looking out, and for catching the wind.
Seven towers in white
The ensemble at Mota del Cuervo consists of seven windmills of the classic Manchegan type: a stout cylindrical tower of whitewashed masonry, a conical cap, and four rectangular lattice sails that were dressed with canvas when the mill was set to work. They stand in a loose line along the ridge, close enough to read as a family, far enough apart that each could take the wind cleanly without robbing its neighbour. As with the better-known groups at Campo de Criptana and Consuegra, the line mixes genuinely old survivors with faithful reconstructions, raised after the region came to understand that its derelict mills were monuments rather than obstacles. Several of the mills carry individual names, in the affectionate Manchegan habit of treating each mill as a character rather than a machine. One of them is kept in working order and opens its doors to visitors, so that the interior of a Manchegan mill, with its beams, its stones and its smell of old timber and flour, is not merely described but shown.
El Zurdo, the mill that turns the other way
The most celebrated character on the hill is the mill known as El Zurdo, which means the left-handed one. Windmill machinery in La Mancha conventionally turns in one direction, a habit passed from millwright to millwright over generations. El Zurdo breaks the rule: its machinery runs the opposite way. Local tradition explains the anomaly with a story that is almost too good to check, that a left-handed miller had the gearing arranged to suit his own hands. Whatever the precise truth behind the tale, the mill is regularly described as a rarity among Spanish windmills, and it has become the emblem of the whole group. There is something fitting about it. La Mancha is the homeland of Don Quixote, literature's great contrarian, and here on the Balcony of La Mancha stands a windmill that quietly refuses to turn the way windmills are supposed to turn.
How a Manchegan windmill works
A Manchegan tower mill is a compact, ingenious building. The whitewashed cylinder typically holds three levels. The ground floor served for storage and for receiving the ground flour. The middle floor was the miller's working chamber. The top floor, up under the conical cap, held the machinery: the wind shaft carrying the sails, the great gear wheel that transferred the rotation downwards, and the pair of millstones between which the grain was crushed. Only the cap rotates. To face the sails into the wind, the miller turned the entire roof by means of a long timber beam that reached down to the ground outside, hauling it around until the sails stood square to the breeze. The sails themselves were bare lattice frames onto which canvas was spread, more cloth for light airs, less for a hard blow. Getting this right was the heart of the craft: too little canvas and the stones turned lazily and ground poorly, too much and the mill could race, overheat the stones, scorch the flour or, in the worst case, wreck itself. A miller listened to his mill the way a sailor listens to rigging.
Small windows and the names of the winds
Climb to the top chamber of a Manchegan mill and you notice a ring of small windows piercing the wall just below the cap. They gave the miller his weather eye. Through them he could watch the sky and the land in every direction, judge an approaching front, and decide when to add canvas, take it in, or stop the mill altogether. Tradition in La Mancha links these little openings to the winds themselves, for the winds of the plain all carry old names that millers knew like the names of neighbours: the solano blowing from the east, the ábrego arriving mild and damp from the south-west, the cierzo cutting down cold from the north, and the notorious matacabras, the goat-killer, a wind so harsh it was said to finish off livestock. A mill on an exposed hilltop lives entirely at the mercy of these visitors, and the whole building is really an instrument for reading them.
In the land of Don Quixote
No one can write about La Mancha windmills without Cervantes looking over their shoulder. The first part of Don Quixote appeared in 1605, and its most famous episode sends the knight charging at windmills he has mistaken for giants, while Sancho Panza protests in vain. Cervantes never pinned the scene to one town, and half of La Mancha has been happily arguing about it ever since. Mota del Cuervo has an excellent claim to a share of the legend: the town lies on the Ruta de Don Quijote, the signposted route through the novel's landscapes, and only a short way from El Toboso, the village of the knight's idealised lady Dulcinea. Whether or not these exact towers stood here to inspire a passing writer, they are precisely the kind of giants the novel describes, white-bodied, long-armed, ranged along a ridge against the sky. Visitors who arrive at dusk, when the sails turn to black silhouettes, tend to concede that the old knight had a point.
Mills that still grind
What lifts Mota del Cuervo above being a mere postcard is that milling here is not entirely a memory. On special occasions the town dresses the sails of a working mill with canvas and grinds grain in the traditional way, a slow, floury piece of living heritage in which the whole community takes pride; the best known of these symbolic millings is dedicated to the cause of peace. Such events matter, because a windmill that never turns is only half itself. The machinery needs use the way the trade once needed apprentices, and every public molienda passes the knowledge of canvas, wind and stone to another pair of hands. The town keeps other crafts alive too, being famous in the region for a pottery tradition historically carried by its women, and together these threads make the hill feel less like a museum and more like an attic the family still visits.
Explore on the map
The seven mills of Mota del Cuervo stand on their ridge with coordinates, photographs and details recorded on our interactive map, alongside the other great windmill groups of La Mancha at Campo de Criptana and Consuegra. Zoom into the Spanish plateau and you can trace the whole geography of Quixote country, mill by mill, and plan a route along the Balcony of La Mancha for yourself. Few detours in inland Spain repay the climb so generously.