El Toboso is a town and municipality

Municipality

A municipality is essentially an urban administrative division having corporate status and usually powers of self-government. It can also be used to mean the governing body of a municipality. A municipality is a general-purpose administrative subdivision, as opposed to a special-purpose district...

 located in the province of Toledo

Toledo (province)

Toledo is a province of central Spain, in the western part of the autonomous community of Castile-La Mancha. It is bordered by the provinces of Madrid, Cuenca, Ciudad Real, Badajoz, Cáceres, and Ávila....

, central Spain

Spain

Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...

. According to the 2009 data, El Toboso has a total population of 2,219 inhabitants. The economy of the town is based on wine production and cattle

Cattle

Cattle are the most common type of large domesticated ungulates. They are a prominent modern member of the subfamily Bovinae, are the most widespread species of the genus Bos, and are most commonly classified collectively as Bos primigenius...

, and sheep.

El Toboso is famous for appearing in the novel Don Quixote by the Spanish

Spanish language

Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...

 writer Miguel de Cervantes

Miguel de Cervantes

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra was a Spanish novelist, poet, and playwright. His magnum opus, Don Quixote, considered the first modern novel, is a classic of Western literature, and is regarded amongst the best works of fiction ever written...

, as the town in which the fictional character

Fictional character

A character is the representation of a person in a narrative work of art . Derived from the ancient Greek word kharaktêr , the earliest use in English, in this sense, dates from the Restoration, although it became widely used after its appearance in Tom Jones in 1749. From this, the sense of...

 Dulcinea

Dulcinea

"Dulcinea del Toboso" is a fictional character who is referred to in Miguel de Cervantes' novel Don Quixote. Seeking the traditions of the knights-errant of old, Don Quixote finds a true love whom he calls Dulcinea. She is a simple peasant in his home town, but Quixote imagines her to be the most...

 lives. The town also appears in Graham Greene

Graham Greene

Henry Graham Greene, OM, CH was an English author, playwright and literary critic. His works explore the ambivalent moral and political issues of the modern world...

's tribute Monsignor Quixote

Monsignor Quixote

Monsignor Quixote is a novel by Graham Greene, published in 1982. The book is a pastiche of the classic Spanish novel Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes with many moments of hilarious comedy, but also offers reflection on matters such as life after a dictatorship, Communism, and the Catholic...

, where the heroes are a priest (supposedly a descendant of Cervantes's character), and the recently deposed Communist mayor

Mayor

In many countries, a Mayor is the highest ranking officer in the municipal government of a town or a large urban city....

 of the town in the post-Franco era.

Main sights

• The Catholic
  Catholic
  The word catholic comes from the Greek phrase , meaning "on the whole," "according to the whole" or "in general", and is a combination of the Greek words meaning "about" and meaning "whole"...
  
   church of San Antonio Abad, built in the 15th century.
• The convent
  Convent
  A convent is either a community of priests, religious brothers, religious sisters, or nuns, or the building used by the community, particularly in the Roman Catholic Church and in the Anglican Communion...
  
   of Trinitarias Recoletas, from the 17th century.
• The Cervantine
  Miguel de Cervantes
  Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra was a Spanish novelist, poet, and playwright. His magnum opus, Don Quixote, considered the first modern novel, is a classic of Western literature, and is regarded amongst the best works of fiction ever written...
  
  Museum.
• The Museum of Dulcinea
• The lake of La Nava.

External links (in English)

• La Casa de la Torre A 17th century manor converted into a charming hotel with a Quixotic ambiance. Rooms devoted to Cervantes' works, with special protagonism to our hero Don Quixote and its literature.

External links (in Spanish)

• El Toboso, cuna de Dulcinea, Town Hall of El Toboso.
• El Toboso, la Casa de la Torre, some interesting material.