Read La hermana San Sulpicio in Spanishwith every sentence explained

La hermana San Sulpicio by Armando Palacio Valdés was first published in 1889. In Passage you read the full text in the original Spanish, marked intermediate and filed under romance. It runs to about 116,500 words.

A shy Galician poet. A laughing Andalusian nun. A love that should be impossible.

Ceferino Sanjurjo, a young doctor from Galicia with literary dreams, arrives at the spa town of Marmolejo expecting a quiet summer. Instead he meets Sister San Sulpicio, a nun from Seville with flashing eyes, a quick tongue and an irresistible laugh. In the world her name is Gloria, and she has not yet taken her final vows.

Smitten, Ceferino follows her to Seville, a city of patios, guitars, flower-filled balconies and courtship through iron window grilles. There he must overcome a family with its own plans for her, the walls of the convent and, above all, his own timidity.

Full of humour, local colour and sparkling dialogue, Sister Saint Sulpice was Armando Palacio Valdés's greatest success and has been filmed three times in Spain.

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.