Read Bailén in Spanishwith every sentence explained

Bailén by Benito Pérez Galdós was first published in 1873. In Passage you read the full text in the original Spanish, marked advanced and filed under historical fiction.

July 1808. On the burning plains of Andalusia, Napoleon’s army is about to learn that it can lose.

In a Madrid still shaken by the uprising of the Dos de Mayo, young Gabriel de Araceli recovers from his wounds and thinks only of Inés, the girl he loves, whose whereabouts he does not know. When a clue points to Córdoba, he heads south with Luis de Santorcaz, a penniless ex-soldier who still worships Napoleon, and on the road they are joined by Andresillo Marijuán, a muleteer bound for the household of the proud Countess of Rumblar.

Soon Gabriel is riding with the Countess’s spoilt young son in the army of General Castaños, marching to meet the French forces of General Dupont. Love, comedy and patriotic fever carry him toward the battle that will give the Emperor his first great defeat on land.

Bailén is the fourth of Benito Pérez Galdós’s Episodios nacionales, the vast, lively series that tells Spain’s nineteenth-century history through those who lived it.

Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in Spanish. Read at your own pace, and when a sentence stops you, tap it. You get:

• a natural translation of that exact sentence,
• a short note on the grammar, in plain words,
• the key words, which you can save with the sentence they came from,
• all of it in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Turkish or Portuguese, whichever you read best.

It's marked advanced, with richer vocabulary and longer sentences. If it feels heavy, start with an intermediate Spanish book and come back to it. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.