Museo Casa Natal de Cervantes

The first space that visitors find after entering is the central courtyard, which features the original stone well that supplied the house with water for everyday use. The lower gallery is supported by eight columns with Corinthian capitals originally from the Episcopal Palace in Alcalá de Henares, while the upper gallery has wooden post and a balustrade of the same material.

The hall
Here visitors can admire the armchairs or “friar chairs” arranged around a brazier. The draped fabric and embossed leather covering the walls helped to keep in the warmth provided by the heater.

The surgery
It is a room dedicated to Rodrigo de Cervantes and displays all the instruments associated with his profession: sirurgical tools, spice racks, alembics, medical treatises and barber´s chair inspired by the gout stools used by Spanish monarchs. On the right wall can find some rests of frescoes, one of the evidences of the original house existence in the mid-16th century.

The dining room
It is decorated with a panel of ornamental tiles like the ones found at the Escorial monastery and features a selection of the most widely used crokery of the period: ceramics from Talavera and Puente del Arzobispo (Toledo), lusterware from Manises (Valencia) and pieces from Villafeliche (Zaragoza).

A doorway in the dinning room leads to a small kitchen with a fireplace, where the household would gather. This is decorated with utensils and arrangements of fruit and vegetables, spices typically found in Mediterranean and Islamic dishes, and large clay jars used to store water from the well and oil for cooking and lighting the rooms.

The tour of the ground floor ends with a visit to the ladies´ room were the women sit on cushions “a la morisca” or Moorish style, to read, play music, do needlework, pray or talk. Rugs, mats and braziers are other typical features of this type of room.

The room dedicated to "the Master Pedro,s puppet show" is a scenographic display featuring tha characters, scenery and a dramatised recording of one of the most renowned passages from Don Quixote (2nd part. CH. XXV et seq.), in conmmemoration of the author's fondness for puppet theatres.

The gentelman’s bedroom
This room recreates the chamber used by the writer’s granfather, Juan de Cervantes, a graduate of law, who was actually the master of this property. An interesting collection of desks, braziers and trunks, evoking his interest for travelling, and the portrait of a mature Miguel de Cervantes are displayed.

Ladies, duennas and children’s chambers.
The women and children slept in differenciated rooms from men. This is an eminently female realm, divided into three separate spaces: the private bathing and dressing room, the women and children´s chamber, and the “estrado del cariño”, or private parlour, with the cradle evoking Cervante´s birth.