What is Don Quixote's real name, revealed near the end of the novel?

Don Quixote’s real name, revealed near the end of the novel, is Alonso Quijano.

Cervantes deliberately delays this identification. In Part One, the narrator jokes that authorities disagree over whether the hidalgo was called Quijada, Quesada, or Quijana. Only in the final chapter of Part Two does he definitively name him Alonso Quijano.

The revelation comes as the protagonist abandons his knight-errant identity, regains his sanity, and prepares to die as an ordinary Christian gentleman. His chosen name, Don Quixote, is therefore a self-created literary persona rather than his birth name.

Readers sometimes encounter the spelling “Alonso Quixano,” reflecting older English usage and Cervantes’s period spelling. “Alonso Quijano” is the standard modern Spanish form and the canonical answer. The name also helps distinguish Cervantes’s character from the fictional hero of Avellaneda’s unauthorized 1614 continuation, who was called Martín Quijada.