They knew him by his rib. “When I saw that rib – I thought, ‘We've found [him] at last!’,” forensic expert Francisco Exteberría told NPR. He had noticed the letters MC on a fragment of the coffin; the flayed rib and the crippled left arm picked up in the Battle of Lepanto.

It was 2015. Deep in the sub-soil of a 17th-Century convent’s grounds, operating quietly so as not to disturb the 12 cloistered nuns who live there in silence, the team of archaeologists and forensic anthropologists had uncovered the remains of at least 15 people – before they came across the splintered coffin.

“The whole team was there in silence, underground, studying what we found – and we all knew.” Even before he received the results from the DNA analysis, Exteberría was sure. In the crypt beneath Madrid’s Convent of the Barefoot Trinitarians lay the skeleton of the great Spanish writer, Miguel de Cervantes.