Dorotea Timeline and Summary

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• Dorotea shows up while Don Quixote and Sancho are hanging in the Sierra Morena mountains. She's dressed as a young man. But she lets her hair down while she's washing in a mountain spring and everyone sees her for what she is: a beautiful woman.
• When Don Quixote and company approach Dorotea, she starts to run. But the curate insists that they're there to help.
• Dorotea agrees to tell her story, which is this:
• Dorotea is the daughter of a wealthy farmer. It turns out that one day, the son of a duke fell in love with her because of her intense beauty and did everything he could to get her into bed with him.
• Well, eventually, this Don Fernando guy (gasp, same dude that Cardenio hates) paid off one of her housekeepers to let him into her bedroom. There, with promises of marriage, he had sex with her.
• At the end of her account, Dorotea reveals her name, and this tells Cardenio that without a doubt, she must be the same woman his friend Fernando used to speak to him about.
• Soon after Fernando betrayed her, Dorotea heard the story of how Fernando had betrayed another friend named Cardenio by stealing his fiancée, Lucinda.
• Soon after, Dorotea decided to leave her house to search for Fernando. But when she heard her name being called out as a missing person in the street, she came to the Sierra Morenas to hide and plan her next move. Now she spends her time running away from shepherds who pursue her sexually.
• After meeting Cardenio and having her hopes for marrying Fernando restored, Dorotea agrees to help with the plot to get Don Quixote back home. She dresses up as the princess of an imaginary kingdom called Micomicon. She tells Don Quixote that she has been exiled by an evil giant who has taken over her country. She says that Don Quixote needs to kill the giant.
• The group travels to an inn, where Dorotea runs into her betrayer, Don Fernando. She tells him that she still loves him and begs him to fulfill his promise to marry her. Her words are so convincing that he eventually relents and agrees.
• It looks like everything will be fine for Dorotea and Fernando, just as it is for Cardenio and Lucinda.