Cervantes

Cervantes is a fishing town in the Wheatbelt region of Western Australia, part of the Dangaragan Shire local government area. It is located in the Indian Ocean, 198 kilometres north of Perth, 227 kilometres south of Geraldton and 24 kilometres south of Jurien Bay.

It is a young town, established 50 years ago to build a lobster fishing village and owes its name to an American whaling ship that ran aground in 1844 on a string of three islands off the coast and was named after the writer (Cervantes). Its 750 inhabitants are spread across two dozen streets named after Spanish place names. You can drive along the endless Corunna Road, leave Talavera Road on your right and have a drink at the closest thing to a beach bar in Cervantes: the reception of the Pinnacles Caravan Park. The beach leads to the docks and back along Madrid, Catalonia and Aragón streets, until reaching the only bar, the Ronsard Bay Tavern, in the commercial area of Iberia and Cádiz Streets. There you will find the grocery store, the drinks store, the video store, the beachwear store, the recommendable and modest Seabreeze Café, and the kiosk-hardware-souvenirs-post office and tourist office.

There are two dozen more streets with names like Valencia, Pamplona, Castilla, Seville, León, Lérida, Córdoba, Majorca, Douro, Evro, Balboa, Picasso, Goya or Sánchez, which are written there with suffixes like street, avenue, place, creek, way or road.

As for the rest, hardly anyone knows who the writer is. The most curious thing about the town of Cervantes is that it owes its name to the author of the most important book in the history of universal literature and that few of its inhabitants know of its existence.