Spanish · Intermediate
Read El sombrero de tres picos in Spanishwith every sentence explained
English title: The Three-Cornered Hat
Pedro Antonio de Alarcón · 1874
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About the book
El sombrero de tres picos by Pedro Antonio de Alarcón was first published in 1874. In Passage you read the full text in the original Spanish, marked intermediate and filed under historical fiction and romance. It runs to about 24,000 words.
A pretty miller's wife. A lovesick magistrate. One very long night of mix-ups.
In an Andalusian town in the early 1800s, the miller Tío Lucas and his wife, the beautiful and quick-witted señá Frasquita, are famous for two things: their happy marriage and the vine-shaded mill where the local gentry like to drop by. Lucas is ugly, clever and wonderfully trusting. Frasquita adores him.
The town's Corregidor, an old, pompous magistrate in a grand three-cornered hat, has fallen for Frasquita, and he hatches a scheme to get the miller out of the way for one night. What follows is a whirlwind of borrowed clothes, mistaken identities, a fall into a millrace, and jealousy running in every direction.
Pedro Antonio de Alarcón based The Three-Cornered Hat (1874) on an old folk tale, and turned it into a comic masterpiece. Manuel de Falla made it a famous ballet, with designs by Picasso. Short, lively and very funny.
- Author
- Pedro Antonio de Alarcón
- First published
- 1874
- Language
- Spanish
- Level
- Intermediate
- Genre
- Historical Fiction, Romance
- Length
- About 24,000 words
How it opens
Comenzaba este largo siglo, que ya va de vencida.—No se sabe fijamente el año: sólo consta que era despues del de 4 y ántes del de 8.
Reinaba, pues, todavía en España don Cárlos IV de Borbon,—por la gracia de Dios, segun las monedas, y por un olvido ó gracia especial de Bonaparte, segun los boletines franceses.—Los demas soberanos europeos descendientes de Luis XIV habian perdido ya la corona (y el jefe de ellos la cabeza) en la deshecha borrasca que corria esta vieja parte del mundo desde 1789.
Reading El sombrero de tres picos in Passage
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 intermediate: comfortable once everyday Spanish feels familiar, with the harder sentences one tap away. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.
