Read Fortunata y Jacinta in Spanishwith every sentence explained

Fortunata y Jacinta by Benito Pérez Galdós was first published in 1887. In Passage you read the full text in the original Spanish, marked advanced and filed under historical fiction and romance. It runs to about 392,600 words.

One man. Two women. A whole city between them.

Madrid, 1869. Juanito Santa Cruz is the charming, spoiled only son of a rich merchant family. One day, climbing the stairs of a tenement in the old quarter, he meets Fortunata, a striking working-class girl eating a raw egg in the doorway, and begins an affair he soon abandons. Then he marries his sweet, well-bred cousin Jacinta, who adores him and longs above all for a child.

But Fortunata does not disappear from his life so easily. As the two women's paths draw closer, Galdós builds an enormous, teeming portrait of Madrid: shopkeepers and aristocrats, pious ladies and dreamers, cafés, markets and crowded balconies.

Published in 1887, Fortunata and Jacinta is Benito Pérez Galdós' masterpiece and the great Spanish realist novel, often placed beside Tolstoy and Balzac. It became a much-loved TV series in 1980. A long read, and an unforgettable one.

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.