Read Cuentos de la selva in Spanishwith every sentence explained

Cuentos de la selva by Horacio Quiroga was first published in 1918. In Passage you read the full text in the original Spanish, marked beginner and filed under children and fantasy. It runs to about 17,600 words.

Flamingos in snake-skin stockings. A tortoise on a mission. A bee who would rather not work.

In the steamy jungles of Misiones, on the border of Argentina and Paraguay, Horacio Quiroga lived among the animals he wrote about, and he told these stories first to his own children. In them, creatures talk, scheme, help each other and sometimes pay dearly for their mistakes.

A giant tortoise carries a sick hunter across the forest to save his life. Vain flamingos go to a snake ball wearing stockings that turn out to be a terrible idea. An army of caimans declares war to defend their river, and a lazy bee learns the hard way why the hive needs everyone.

Published in 1918, South American Jungle Tales is one of the best-loved children's books in Latin America, read in primary schools from Buenos Aires to Mexico. Simple, vivid and quietly wise, these eight fables are a perfect first taste of real Spanish storytelling.

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 beginner, so it's a good first whole book if you know the basics of Spanish and want something you can finish. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.