The windmills of La Mancha are high, cylindrical towers of dazzling white capped with black cones. From a distance they look like portly nuns on their way to mass. The conical tops have over the years been fashioned from a variety of materials: straw, wood and now zinc.

In Cervante's time, the vanes would have been made from Black Poplar, a wood which does not shrink, warp or swell. Internal machinery was oak, lubricated with tallow, the whole held together by expert carpentry and rivets of pine.

Both tower mills and the open wooden trestle mills were used for grinding grains, though the Spanish language distinguishes between the two, the tower mills are molinos, and the trestle and modern wind-farm mills, molinas or molinetas.

At intervals around the tower were windows, set not for the pleasure of looking out over the lush Iberian landscape, but for alerting the miller to a change in winds.

It was imperative that he knew the very instant the wind changed so he could move the tiller beam (or tailpole) to turn the mill. Failure to do this, especially if the wind strengthened could, and often did, result in the total destruction of the building.

Should the vanes move too rapidly, friction sparks from the stones could ignite the flour and there are many stories of sudden gales which, catching an inattentive miller unawares, stripped the tower of the sails, cone and part of the building itself, often with loss of life, always with loss of livelihood.

From the 13th Century, 3rd March has been Llueca's Day, a month when comets flew and people would gather at the mill to pay homage, bringing food to share. Each villager would be given a hollow bun in celebration of the miracle of harvest and the mill's part in it.

There was in fact, another miracle taking place. The word 'mill' means, 'to go round' and until mechanisation, grain was processed manually and traditionally by women. When milling was harnessed to the winds, a huge cultural turn was also brought about , for then the task began to revolve around men.

Perhaps those simple villagers were more spiritual than we are today. They had built by hand the imposing towers which ground to infinitesimal dust that grain the Deity had provided and matured to sustain their bodies.  

Standing beneath the vast edifice with its sails turning and creaking against the heavens, they must have felt they had harnessed the very breath of God.

Llueca's Day is still celebrated around the windmills, now a family festival of kites and food.

Every Spanish mill was given a name. In the northeast province of Ciudad Real some thirty mills sit on the Hill of La Paz. The Sardinero contains some original, 17th century machinery; The Culebro and The Lizard house museums (the latter dedicated to farming) The Pylon preserves the history of wine; The Burleta and Infant also have original machinery, the latter still grinding grain so that visitors may observe the operation of a working mill. The Poyatos serves as the Office of Tourism.

At San Pedro del Pinatar Saltworks Nature Reserve, a unique Mediterranean coastal area of 700 hectares, there are dunes, salt marshes, reed beds and wild sandy beaches. But also encañizadas the traditional fishing system of Mar Menor.

Fish are forced to pass across a complex labyrinth built of reeds and wood  whence they are captured - the water is pumped through this system by windmill.

But lately there has been another revolution in the world of windmills, the winds of change are blowing across the Iberian mountains and Spain is rapidly turning to the modern, electricity-generating mills as source of clean power. This has caused criticism in some quarters.

From a local news report:

In Tarifa, the well-established wind park generates some 1500 kW of power for approximately 300,000 inhabitants.

They may be vital to the economy, they may be powerful and awesome as they march across the landscape but wind turbines have none of the romance Cervantes saw when his Don Quixote tilted at the great windmills of Spain.