‘Don Quixote and Sancho Panza’

In the middle of Brussels’s city center stands a pair of statues unmistakably portraying the famous Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Located between Place d’Espagne and Boulevard de l’Imperatrice, the sculpture is a replica of the Monument to Miguel de Cervantes in Madrid, created in 1929 by Lorenzo Coullaut Valera.

The statue features the titular character of Cervantes’s 17th-century novel, The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha—better known as simply Don Quixote. Our protagonist is on horseback, while his squire Sancho Panza rides a donkey.

Though what the statue commemorates is up for speculation, it is supposed that it was installed in the 1990s in remembrance of the first publication of Don Quixote outside the Iberian Peninsula, which was an edition printed in Brussels in 1607.