Consuegra Windmills
Molinos de Consuegra
Interesting facts
- Each mill has eight small windows around its top floor, which let the miller read the direction of the wind.
- The whole conical cap, sails and all, was turned into the wind by hand, using a long pole that reaches down to the ground.
- Inside are three floors: a grain store at the bottom, a sieving room where flour was separated from bran, and the machinery under the cap.
- Millers hauled sacks of grain weighing some 60 to 70 kilograms up the narrow stairs to the grinding floor.
- A brake on the 40-tooth Catalan wheel controlled the speed, while a lever system set the gap between stones for fine or coarse flour.
- The design, a fixed masonry tower under a rotating cap, follows the tower-mill type that spread from the Netherlands in the 16th and 17th centuries.
- Many of the Cervantes names are fairly recent: a 1963 list still recorded mills called La Zorra and Santo Domingo.
- Historical records link the castle on the ridge to Almanzor, the powerful tenth-century ruler of al-Andalus.
Why it is worth it
A bare ridge above the town of Consuegra, the Cerro Calderico, carries one of the most recognisable skylines in Spain: a file of white windmills with black conical caps, strung out along the crest behind a medieval castle. Thirteen mills once stood here; twelve have been rebuilt and can be visited, making this the most complete set of windmills in La Mancha. The region had few rivers reliable enough for water mills, so for centuries the steady wind across the plain did the grinding instead.
The mills went up mostly between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, though an 1847 survey still counted only ten flour mills working here, and most of the present group took their form in the first half of the nineteenth century. Each has a name, many drawn from Cervantes — Sancho, Rucio, Mambrino, Clavileño, Caballero del Verde Gabán, alongside Bolero, Espartero, Chispas and others. Sancho is the one to see inside: it keeps a complete sixteenth-century mechanism, with a toothed Catalan wheel, an oak lantern gear and a framework of pine beams, and a few others such as Rucio, Bolero and Espartero also keep original machinery. The whole ensemble was declared a protected historic site in 2008.
The castle at the head of the ridge, La Muela, may go back to the Islamic period; during the Reconquest it passed to the Knights Hospitaller of St John, who ruled the surrounding Campo de San Juan from it. It was wrecked in the Peninsular War in 1813 and has been under reconstruction since the town took it over in 1962. Together the mills and the castle make the landscape that readers have long pictured for Don Quixote's charge against the giants. On the last weekend of October, at the Saffron Rose festival held since 1963, the sails of Sancho turn again and grain is ground and shared out in the "Molienda de la Paz".
Getting there
The mills stand on the hill directly above Consuegra, in the province of Toledo, about 60 km from Toledo itself; Daimiel is about 42 km away. The nearest major airport is Adolfo Suárez Madrid–Barajas (MAD), about 116 km away.
On these lists
39.44974, -3.60729per Wikidata