This Spanish dramatist and novelist began his famous comic novel Don Quixote published in 1605, in Seville prison, after he was jailed for debt in 1597.

Cervantes uses the theme of the idealistic, insane knight and the devoted, down to earth squire to portray many complex themes through a series of unforgettable incidents -both tragic and comic- as a mixture of various tones.

The book is unsurpassed as a masterpiece of humor, a scintillating portrait of 16th century Spanish society made all the more beautiful by the fantastic prose style.

Cervantes started the novel in order to parody the many romances of chivalry which were circulating in those times and which the Church was unsuccessfully trying to check, but the hero got the better of him.

The result is the unforgettable character of Don Quixote, “so conspicuous and void of difficulty that children may handle him, youths may read him, men may understand him and old men may celebrate him”.