Luis Rogelio HM · CC BY-SA 2.0Town
Argamasilla de Alba is a municipality in the Province of Ciudad Real, Castile-La Mancha, Spain. It has a population of 6,791.
According to local legend, Don Quixote author Miguel de Cervantes was held prisoner here, and refers to the municipality in the prologue of Don Quixote Part I, making a joke about imprisonment – "engendered in a jail" – because the word "argamasilla" is Spanish for "mortar". The text talks about it as the place where Don Quixote is buried, and that the "Academicians of Argamasilla" meet at the gravesite.
Contrary to the foundation of the joke, Argamasilla de Alba has never had a group of academicians working there, and modern Cervantes scholars believe this is a reference to his well-documented imprisonment in the Cárcel Real of Seville. José María Casasayas, founder of the Asociación de Cervantes, delivered a paper in 1999 in which he proposed that the town in Part I of the novel was Argamasilla de Alba, but in Part II, internal evidence suggests it was Argamasilla de Calatrava, a confusion deliberately created by Cervantes.
The town's tourist and cultural office is located in a rebuilt house, the "Casa de Medrano", which contains beneath the "Cave of Medrano", in which Cervantes' imprisonment allegedly took place. In the nineteenth century, Juan Eugenio Hartzenbusch had a printing press set up in the cave and printed there an edition of Don Quixote. In keeping with the action of the novel's "Academicians of Argamasilla", the Asociación de Cervantistas held its annual meeting in Argamasilla de Alba in 1995, and returned for a meeting in 2005.
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Parks, beaches and places to stay that OpenStreetMap marks as dog-friendly. Many places allow dogs without it being marked: ask when you book.
No data on: train station, ATMs, post office, EV chargers, street market, secondary school, pool.
Data from OpenStreetMap (ODbL), extract from October 2026: we count what is mapped within the municipal boundary. "No data" means OpenStreetMap doesn't have it, not that it doesn't exist. Completed with Overture Maps (CDLA-Permissive-2.0): the pharmacies, health centres, petrol stations, banks, cash machines, food shops and schools that OpenStreetMap was missing. Connectivity: Spanish Ministry for Digital Transformation, % of homes covered in June 2025.
Right now nobody has listed a home or land in Argamasilla de Alba. Rental and purchase prices for the area are under “Cost of living”.
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Official figures, each with its source, its year and whether it refers to the village or the province. They are medians and averages: your case may differ.
| Renting a flat (median)MIVAU, rent indices · 2024 · figure for Argamasilla de Alba · 91 leases | €300/month |
|---|---|
| Renting a house (median)MIVAU, rent indices · 2024 · figure for Argamasilla de Alba | €285/month |
| Buying a home (appraised value)MIVAU, appraised value of private housing · Q2 2026 · figure for the province of Ciudad Real | €854/m² |
| Average net household incomeINE, Income Distribution Atlas · 2023 · figure for Argamasilla de Alba | €27,373/year |
| Petrol 95Ministry, fuel prices · 15 October 2026 · average of 17 petrol stations within 10 km | €1.722/litre |
| DieselMinistry, fuel prices · 15 October 2026 · average of 17 petrol stations within 10 km | €1.853/litre |
Sources: State Housing Rent Index System and appraised housing value (Spanish Ministry of Housing and Urban Agenda); Household Income Distribution Atlas (INE); fuel prices (Spanish Ministry for the Ecological Transition). Open data, reusable with attribution. The set lunch menu and coffee aren't shown: there are no public statistics on those prices by village or by province.
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