Read Cuentos de la Alhambra in Spanishwith every sentence explained

Cuentos de la Alhambra by Washington Irving was first published in 1832. In Passage you read the full text in the Spanish translation by Luis Lamarca, marked advanced and filed under fantasy and historical fiction. It runs to about 29,300 words.

A palace of fountains and moonlight. A traveller who moves in. Legends that come alive.

In the spring of 1829, the American writer Washington Irving rides from Seville to Granada and does something wonderful: he moves into the Alhambra, the half-ruined palace of the last Moorish kings. He wanders its courtyards and towers, is looked after by cheerful Dolores, niece of the palace's old housekeeper, and is adopted by Mateo, a talkative local guide who knows every legend of the place.

Two of the most magical tales are included here: the Legend of the Arabian Astrologer, about an ancient sage who protects an old sultan with an enchanted bronze horseman, until a mysterious captive princess comes between them; and the story of Prince Ahmed al Kamel, the Pilgrim of Love, who learns the language of birds and sets out to find the princess of his dreams.

The book made the Alhambra world-famous. This early Spanish translation keeps some old-fashioned spelling, but the tales are simple and enchanting.

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.