Spain’s Wind Towns Are Thriving
Go looking for wind farms in Spain, and you might quickly end up in Castilla–La Mancha, a region southeast of Madrid. This is the place where Don Quixote, Miquel de Cervantes’s delusional Man of La Mancha, attacked small wooden windmills he perceived as fierce giants and where today giant wind turbines have become an embedded part of the landscape. There, I met Mayor Isabel Martínez Arnedo, who has run the town of Higueruela since 2019. The region’s distinctive wind whipped her dark curls as she stepped out of her car. “Look!” she said in Spanish. “Windmills, windmills, windmills.” They were lined up along a ridge at the edge of the small rural town, blades spinning high atop pale-blue towers. A verdant valley lay below, and beyond that, another ridge was crowned with more turbines. When the town’s wind farms were first built, more than 25 years ago, “this was seen as futuristic,” she told me. She was just 23 years old then, and it was the largest wind farm in Europe, the second largest in …
