Military honours for Miguel de Cervantes

The mayor of Madrid presided over the ceremony (Photo: 1st Regiment “Immemorial”)

Soldiers standing next to the funerary monument (Photo: 1st Regiment “Immemorial”)

Miguel de Cervantes’s remains, found in the crypt of the San Ildefonso and San Juan de Mata Monastery, are now resting under a tombstone inside this church in downtown Madrid. On 11 June Ana Botella, acting mayor of Madrid, presided over a ceremony to pay tribute to the author, accompanied by Joaquín Martín, vicar of Religious Life of the Archbishopric of Madrid, Darío Villanueva, director of the Royal Spanish Academy, and General Antonio Nadal, chief of the Historic Heritage Section of the Institute of Military History and Culture.

The ceremony was attended by the descendants of the military units Miguel de Cervantes belonged to: 10th Mechanised Infantry Regiment “Córdoba” and 67th Light Infantry Regiment “Tercio Viejo de Sicilia”. The music band of the 1st Infantry Regiment “King’s Immemorial” also took part.

“Cervantes is back where he wanted to be, where his conscience dictated he should be, to show his appreciation to the Trinitarian Order which brought to an end his five and a half years of suffering in an Algerian prison,” stated Ana Botella, who presented a biographical note of the author. “With his work, Cervantes coined the best literary Spanish, for which we will always owe him a debt of gratitude, and invented the modern novel, a genre enjoyed today by hundreds of millions of readers across the world. Today we also pay homage to Spain’s extraordinary legacy of history and culture. A unique, incomparable legacy we share with more than five hundred million people around the world through that common treasure which is the Spanish language,” she added.