Don Quixote takes place in Cervantes's Spain, beginning in the region of La Mancha, along roads, inns, and villages. The book gives no date: the narrator opens with "not long ago" and leaves the village unnamed.
Part One travels through lands of La Mancha and the Sierra Morena. The gentleman sets out from a village whose name the narrator does not wish to recall, passes inns that he sees as castles, descends into the Sierra Morena, where he performs the penance of Beltenebros and meets Cardenio, and returns caged. In Part Two, El Toboso, Dulcinea's homeland, is the first stop; then come the cave of Montesinos, the dukes' castle, and the journey that was bound for Zaragoza and, in chapter LIX, changes course toward Barcelona, where Roque Guinart, the galleys, and the beach of defeat await.
As for time, the book is contemporary with its reader. The characters carry the Spain of 1600 with them: a captive who served at Lepanto and was in Algiers, the Morisco Ricote, expelled from the kingdom. Chivalry was already a thing of books: in Cervantes's time, the romances of chivalry had been surpassed by the literature of the Golden Age, and no one saw them as a threat, which makes the gentleman, to almost everyone who meets him, a figure from another age.
Between the two parts lie ten years of publication, from 1605 to 1615, but within the fiction the interval is short: Part Two begins with the priest and the barber nearly a month without seeing the gentleman, so as not to renew his memory of past events. What marks time in Part Two is something else: ten years later for the reader, everyone who meets the gentleman has already read Part One.