This sculpture is located on a movable base that welcomes the visitor to Espanola Way. The base can be moved to allow access to vehicular traffic which is normally not permitted. The sculpture depicts the famous fictional character Don Quixote on horseback doing battle with a windmill.
There is no indication at the site about the artist or date.
Wikipedia (
visit link) informs us:
"Don Quixote ..., fully titled The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha (Spanish: El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha), is a Spanish novel by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. It follows the adventures of a nameless hidalgo (at the end of Part II given the name Alonso Quixano) who reads so many chivalric novels that he loses his sanity and decides to set out to revive chivalry, undo wrongs, and bring justice to the world, under the name Don Quixote. He recruits a simple farmer, Sancho Panza, as his squire, who often employs a unique, earthy wit in dealing with Don Quixote's rhetorical orations on antiquated knighthood. Don Quixote, in the first part of the book, does not see the world for what it is, and prefers to imagine that he is living out a knightly story. The story implements various themes, such as intertextuality, realism, metatheatre, and literary representation.
Published in two volumes, in 1605 and 1615, Don Quixote is considered the most influential work of literature from the Spanish Golden Age and the entire Spanish literary canon. As a founding work of modern Western literature,[citation needed] and one of the earliest canonical novels, it regularly appears high on lists of the greatest works of fiction ever published, such as the Bokklubben World Library collection which cites Don Quixote as authors' choice for the "best literary work ever written", and has been translated into more languages than any book other than the Bible.[citation needed] It has had major influence on the literary community, as evidenced by direct references in Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers (1844) and Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)."
As for the asteroid, Wikipedia (
visit link) informs us:
"3552 Don Quixote is an Amor, Mars-crossing, Jupiter-crossing asteroid. It has a highly inclined comet-like orbit[1] that leads to frequent perturbations by Jupiter, measures 18.4 km in diameter and has a rotation period of 7.7 hours. Don Quixote was discovered by Paul Wild in 1983, and is named after the comic knight who is the eponymous hero of Cervantes' Spanish novel Don Quixote (1605).
Due to its comet-like orbit and albedo, Don Quixote has ever been suspected to be an extinct comet. However, infrared observations with the Spitzer Space Telescope at 4.5 µm revealed a faint coma and tail around the object.[2] The cometary activity is interpreted as CO2 molecular band emission. It is not clear if the observed activity is persistent or an outburst, resulting from the excavation of sub-surface CO2 ice due to a recent impact of a smaller body."