The Renaissance, which gave the world great masters of pen and brush, endowed the Spanish land with such a bright and colorful figure as Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. The whole world knows Cervantes and his incomparable hero Don Quixote. However, life itself, the biography of the writer, already shrouded in the haze of centuries, is little known to our domestic reader, although the heroes of his immortal novel are well known to everyone. The author of the proposed book for many years studied Spanish archival materials, all publications and publications related to the era of Cervantes, and wrote the first documentary biography of the great Spanish writer in Russian, which takes into account all the latest research in world cervantics.