Peralada brings its fabulous Cervantes collection to the Belgian Sawmill in Madrid.

A Thousand and One Quixotes. From El Paular to Peralada Castle . Since yesterday, Madrid City Hall's Serrería Belga cultural space has hosted an exhibition featuring a representative sample of the five thousand works by Miguel de Cervantes preserved in the magnificent collection begun a century ago by bibliophile Miguel Mateu Pla.

With this round trip from El Paular, in the Guadarrama mountains, from where the pine wood arrived that was later transformed into the paper for books such as Don Quixote – whose first edition, in 1605, was printed very close to the Belgian Sawmill, in the workshop of Juan de la Cuesta on Atocha Street – to the library in the Empordà region, and, temporarily, back to Madrid, a circle is closed.

The exhibition covers some of the five thousand works by Cervantes in the library started by Miguel Mateu Pla

Thanks to a public-private partnership between Madrid City Council and the Fundació Castell de Peralada, the circle will allow the public to see for the first time several works that had not been exhibited to the public until now, such as the original illustrations by Isidro and Antonio Carnicero for the 1782 edition of Don Quixote sponsored by the Royal Spanish Academy; the drawings by Daniel Vierge for the 1909 Paris edition; and three watercolors that José Jiménez Aranda painted for the commemoration of the third centenary in 1905.

Among the jewels that the exhibition treasures is also an oil sketch of the mural that Josep Maria Sert painted at the end of the 1920s in the dining room of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York and which represents the quixotic episode of The Marriage of Camacho .

Throughout the tour, divided into six sections, visitors can appreciate some of the emblematic editions of Don Quixote and other works by Cervantes and, at the same time, observe the evolution of graphic arts from the 17th century, when books were still printed in a very rudimentary way, to the fabulous full-color illustrations of the children's editions, passing through the legendary interpretation of the ingenious gentleman of La Mancha by the Frenchman Gustave Doré in Paris in 1863.

As a curiosity, and considering that it is a library in the Empordà region like the one in Peralada, some cork editions of Don Quixote have also arrived at the Madrid exhibition, as well as others from very far away places, such as the one illustrated in 1936 by Serizawa Keisuke in Japan, in which the novel's characters appear as samurai.

In addition to the curious section Cervantine Iconography , which displays stamps, ex libris, playing cards and even hallelujahs based on the figure of Don Quixote, the exhibition also dedicates a section to the relationship of Miguel de Cervantes with Madrid, with quotes taken from his works, and, finally, it focuses on the early connection of the singular knight-errant with music: already in 1614, a year before the second part of his adventures appeared, the character was brought to the ballet ( Don Quichot ) and since then it has not ceased to be a source of inspiration.