Sancho Panza never existed, but in our heads he exists: a good farmer, short of understanding, who allows himself to be convinced by Don Quixote to act as a squire.
There is something that encourages his decision to follow the man from La Mancha, and that is that Sancho aspires to be the governor of an island.
The reader knows that this will never happen, but the bait of the island is the longing that Sancho cherishes throughout the adventure of the novel.
In the second part of the play, Cervantes puts Sancho and Don Quixote in the palace of some dukes who laugh at both of them and make the naive squire believe that he has indeed been appointed governor of a place: Barataria.
The name is a play on words made surely from the
Baratarian
name
,
place where it was sold deceptively.
Barataria never existed, just as Don Quixote did not exist.
But in homage to Cervantes's novel, the map of America registers two so-called places.
Barataria, in effect, left the Cervantes work to make a real place in the Caribbean: in Trinidad and Tobago (in the San Juan Laventille area) there is a town called Barataria.
And the very name of
Barataria
has an enclave in the United States, in Jefferson, in the state of Louisiana, possibly inheriting the name Barataria that the Spanish military and politician Bernardo de Gálvez had given to a town in the area.
The great names in literature, like those of other cultural fields, have a memory in the names of statues, plaques or monuments.
A walk through any Spanish province makes us easily come across streets that are called, for example, Cervantes, Blasco Ibáñez or Emilia Pardo Bazán in homage to these authors.
But there are much more striking and curious tributes, such as these cases in which the place that a writer devised to place the action of his work, called with an invented name and created from his head, becomes a reality to become a geographical point, a place existing and fixed on maps.
Place names, technically called
toponyms,
sometimes emerge from literature to enter actual geography.
Another similar case is that of a town called Guadalema de los Quintero, a district of the municipality of Utrera (Seville).
This enclave was founded less than a century ago;
The National Institute of Colonization, created in the postwar period, founded more than 300 towns throughout Spain with the aim of reorganizing populations and reactivating certain agricultural crops.
One of the towns that he created was in an area near Utrera, the place where the Álvarez Quintero brothers, Serafín (1871) and Joaquín (1873), were born, very famous writers in the Spanish theater for their costumbrista works.
In several of them an invented Andalusian town called "Guadalema" is mentioned as a place of action.
Well, when the Colonization Institute founded that town near Utrera, it called it Guadalema de los Quintero and named its streets after characters or comedies by the writer brothers.
The Quintero family invented a Guadalema for their books, and it ended up appearing on maps of the province of Seville.
Today it has a thousand inhabitants.
Outside of Spain there is a similar case.
The French writer Marcel Proust (1871) invented the name of an imaginary town called
Combray
as the place where the action of
On the Path of Swann,
one of the novels of the series
In Search of Lost Time, takes place
.
Recognition of Proust's work made that town come into existence and begin to appear on maps: Illiers, a town two hours from Paris where Proust was inspired to create Combray, changed its name in 1971 to Illiers-Combray to render him a tribute to this author.
A similar compliment was given to the Russian writer Aleksandr Pushkin (1799), who studied between 1811 and 1817 in the city of Tsárskoye Seló (translatable as 'royal village'), named after 1937 Pushkin in recognition of this author.
In Illiers-Combray, there is also the Marcel Proust Museum .. Google Maps
But for literature to enter the maps it takes more than the will of some readers.
Macondo
was the name given by Gabriel García Márquez to the imagined place where successive generations of the Buendía family spent their lives.
The hometown of García Márquez, Aracataca, in Colombia, in 2006 considered changing its name to Aracataca-Macondo in homage to the writer and as a way to attract readers' visits.
But the referendum failed due to lack of participation, and the town is still called Aracataca, even though there are neighborhoods called Macondo, Urbanización Gabriel García Márquez or Ciudadela Macondo.
It is not usual for the place names invented by writers to go from books to maps.
Normally, if there are towns or cities that pay tribute to a specific person, of real and effective existence, it is because this has been a military or a prominent hero: the Italian city of Reggio Emilia was called
Regium Lepidi
in
Roman times
in honor of the politician and Roman soldier Marco Emilio Lepido.
The dictator of the Dominican Republic Rafael Leónidas Trujillo wanted to change the name of the capital of the Dominican Republic, Santo Domingo, to Ciudad Trujillo, and that's how the place was called from 1936 to 1961. Since 1828, Morelia in Mexico pays tribute to the priest José María Morelos y Pavón (1765-1815), one of the leaders of the Mexican Independence ... There are many cases of this type.
That literature changes maps is not common.
Literature seems destined more to change people than places.
The recent confinement showed it: reading imaginatively raised the roofs of many houses to let in fresh air.
Books can change paradigms, mental schemes, make us discover passions or hatred;
they are a good way to model ourselves.
But if he really manages to change the maps and Barataria exists today, why not think that Don Quixote also exists or that in some place whose name we do not want to remember Sancho Panza governs?
The names that Galdós invented in his novels
Madrid is the setting for a large part of the novels of Don Benito Pérez Galdós, who also invented some place names in his novels.
Orbajosa is the name of the fictional city in which
Doña Perfecta
takes place
and secondarily also appears in
La incognita
(1899).
He also created Ficóbriga as a Cantabrian fishing village, the scene of his work
Gloria
, surely inspired by the old name of Castro Urdiales,
Flaviobriga.
Socartes
is the name of the Cantabrian fishing village invented by Galdós as the setting for
Marianela
.
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