This website provides some information about the monument:
"This dramatic bronze statue, of Cervante’s grandiose anti-hero Don Quixote, was gifted by Spain in 1980 to celebrate the founding of the city of Buenos Aires in 1580.
Crafted by Aurelio Teno, a Spanish sculptor well known for his numerous depictions of Don Quixote, the statue measures 15 metres tall and weighs an impressive 200 tonnes. Built in Uruguay, with the help of seven engineers and more than 100 other workers, it took more than six months to complete but neither the great deal of work, nor the presence of Spain’s Queen Sofía at its inauguration, could save the statue from public opinion.
Immediately after its installation, it was harshly criticised, mostly by other artists, for being unsightly, poorly located and irrelevant to Argentina.
Looking very much like its bemused yet determined namesake, the sculpture captures not only the oddity of Don Quixote’s character but also of his steed, whose awkward twisting neck has been sculpted to appear more bull-like than horse.
Sculptor Antonio Pujia called it “tasteless, vulgar and completely lacking in creativity”, whilst the painter Nicolás García Uriburu described it as “the ugliest thing in the city”. Others claimed it was imbalanced and out of proportion with one critic likening it to a scarecrow, and another referring to the white pedestal base as a giant sugar cube.
Offended by the work perhaps out of a national pride, many Argentines felt the statue represented a belittling of Buenos Aires by the Spanish and called for its relocation to the Plaza España, a location perhaps more fitting for its theme.
For more than 30 years the statue has remained in its original position however, although now lacks the descriptive plaque which the city government ceased replacing after it was vandalised and stolen on successive occasions."
As for Don Quijote, Wikipedia (
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"Don Quixote is considered one of the most influential works of literature from the Spanish Golden Age and the entire Spanish literary canon. As a founding work of modern Western literature and one of the earliest canonical novels, it regularly appears high on lists of the greatest works of fiction ever published, such as the Bokklubben World Library collection that cites Don Quixote as authors' choice for the "best literary work ever written".
The story follows the adventures of a hidalgo named Mr. Alonso Quixano who reads so many chivalric romances that he loses his sanity and decides to set out to revive chivalry, undo wrongs, and bring justice to the world, under the name Don Quixote de la Mancha. He recruits a simple farmer, Sancho Panza, as his squire, who often employs a unique, earthy wit in dealing with Don Quixote's rhetorical orations on antiquated knighthood. Don Quixote, in the first part of the book, does not see the world for what it is and prefers to imagine that he is living out a knightly story. Throughout the novel, Cervantes uses such literary techniques as realism, metatheatre, and intertextuality. It had a major influence on the literary community, as evidenced by direct references in Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers (1844), Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) and Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac (1897), as well as the word "quixotic". Arthur Schopenhauer cited Don Quixote as one of the four greatest novels ever written, along with Tristram Shandy, La Nouvelle Héloïse and Wilhelm Meister."
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