Spanish · Intermediate
Read El Zarco in Spanishwith every sentence explained
English title: El Zarco, the Bandit
Ignacio Manuel Altamirano · 1901
Free to start · iPhone, iPad & Mac
About the book
El Zarco by Ignacio Manuel Altamirano was first published in 1901. In Passage you read the full text in the original Spanish, marked intermediate and filed under mystery and crime, romance and thriller and suspense. It runs to about 51,200 words.
A town terrorized by bandits. A girl in love with the most dangerous of them all.
In the early 1860s, after years of civil war, the orange groves of Yautepec in southern Mexico live in fear of the Plateados, gangs of silver-trimmed horsemen who rob, kidnap and kill. Their most feared leader is El Zarco, the blue-eyed bandit.
Proud, beautiful Manuela is secretly in love with him and dreams of jewels and adventure, while she scorns Nicolás, the honest blacksmith who adores her. Gentle Pilar, who grew up at Manuela's side, quietly loves Nicolás herself. When Manuela decides to follow her bandit, two very different paths open before the young people of Yautepec.
Ignacio Manuel Altamirano's fast-moving novel is a classic of Mexican literature, read in schools and adapted for the screen in 1959 and 2019.
- Author
- Ignacio Manuel Altamirano
- First published
- 1901
- Language
- Spanish
- Level
- Intermediate
- Genre
- Mystery and Crime, Romance, Thriller and Suspense
- Length
- About 51,200 words
How it opens
Yautepec es una población de tierra calienta, cuyo caserío se esconde en un bosque de verdura. De lejos, ora se llegue de Cuernavaca por el camino quebrado de las Tetillas, que serpentea en medio de dos colinas rocallosas cuya forma les ha dado nombre, ora descienda de la fría y empinada sierra de Tepoztlán, por el lado Norte, o que se descubra por el sendero llano que viene del valle de Amilpas por el Oriente, atravesando las ricas y hermosas haciendas de caña de Cocoyoc, Calderón, Casasano y San Carlos, siempre se contempla a Yautepec como un inmenso bosque por el que sobresalen apenas las torrecillas de su iglesia parroquial.
Reading El Zarco 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.
