Puerto Lápice
We re-energized ourselves with a cup of excellent Spanish coffee. Note the profound lack of tourists here. My kind of place.
(I'm afraid coffee has been ruined for us. Throughout Spain we drank nothing but espresso with a little water added to make café Americano. When we get home, we'll have to look into getting our own espresso maker. I can't imagine going back to drip.)
Driving the small back roads through farmland, you occasionally see wells with crude mechanisms for raising irrigation water. One such has been preserved in the main plaza.
This one was probably driven by a power takeoff from a tractor via a flat leather belt. The gear train turned the wheel which scooped up water, one bucket at a time, and dumped it into a flume which fed the fields. It's an old design; its ancestors probably were mule-driven.
They don't make 'em like that anymore.
But we didn't come here for coffee or wells. A hint of our true objective appeared on the four tiled benches that surround the well.
The quotation is from Chapter 2 of Don Quixote, referring to his delusional tilting at windmills, thinking they are giants. The tiles depict him charging one while Sancho Panza looks on in consternation.
The windmills somehow have been preserved, just as they were when Cervantes wrote about them at the beginning of the 17th Century. They're just up the road in the town of Consuegra.
The hilltop we visited was, as we expected, windy. The windmills had been built where they would work best.
Only one of those at Consuegra was still in working condition, and it is operated only in October, during a Saffron festival for some reason.
I would have liked to view the millstones and the gears, but the buildings were closed. Not enough visitors come here in May to warrant staffing the site; a pity. However, from the outside, I could observe at least a few things about how they worked.
The main axle and vanes are mounted on a conical top that can be rotated, to face them into the wind so as to extract maximum power. In all the mills I saw, the top had to be rotated manually, by swinging the long beam at the rear into the lee. In contrast, many Dutch windmills and all of the old Aeromotor-type windmills once familiar on American and Canadian farms employ mechanisms for automatically pointing into the wind.
The beams apparently serve another purpose. The stone towers are cylindrical, meaning that masonry walls would have to withstand considerable shear forces; perhaps enough to knock them over. The long post serves as a brace to resist these forces. The towers of Dutch windmills are more cone-shaped, making them self-bracing.
I could also see that the vanes were attached to the rotors weakly, so that they would break away in unusually high winds, again to protect the mills from being knocked down.
The windmills represent a technology that was developed through trial and error, before the days when physics became well enough understood to permit paper designs. Yet, I could see a sophistication in their structures and mechanisms. On another distant hilltop, we could just make out the shapes of modern windmills generating electricity. Their designs are the result of computer simulations of blade shapes and airflows. They extract far more power from the wind than these 300-year-old mills. But they are nowhere near as romantic.