Spanish · Beginner
Read La Navidad en las montañas in Spanishwith every sentence explained
English title: Christmas in the Mountains
Ignacio Manuel Altamirano · 1871
Free to start · iPhone, iPad & Mac
About the book
La Navidad en las montañas by Ignacio Manuel Altamirano was first published in 1871. In Passage you read the full text in the original Spanish, marked beginner and filed under historical fiction and young adult. It runs to about 17,300 words.
A weary soldier, a hidden mountain village and the gentlest Christmas Eve of his life.
It is the afternoon of 24 December, and a young captain, driven from home by Mexico's civil wars, rides alone through a sea of wild mountains, remembering the Christmases of his childhood and his student days in Mexico City. As night falls, his old orderly González brings news: the priest of a nearby village is on the road and offers them shelter.
The priest turns out to be a Spaniard, and the captain braces himself for an awkward evening. Instead he meets a remarkable man who has quietly transformed his poor mountain parish, and a whole village celebrating with harps, carols, sweet fritters and bonfires. There is even a love story waiting to be mended: pretty Carmen hopes to ask forgiveness of Pablo, the young man who was taken away three years ago.
Ignacio Manuel Altamirano's short, warm novella is a little gem of Mexican literature, a favourite school reader for generations.
- Author
- Ignacio Manuel Altamirano
- First published
- 1871
- Language
- Spanish
- Level
- Beginner
- Genre
- Historical Fiction, Young Adult
- Length
- About 17,300 words
How it opens
El sol se ocultaba ya; las nieblas ascendían del profundo seno de los valles; deteníanse un momento entre los obscuros bosques y las negras gargantas de la cordillera, como un rebaño gigantesco; después avanzaban con rapidez hacia las cumbres; se desprendían majestuosas de las agudas copas de los abetos e iban por último a envolver la soberbia frente de las rocas, titánicos guardianes de la montaña que habían desafiado allí, durante millares de siglos, las tempestades del cielo y las agitaciones de la tierra.
Reading La Navidad en las montañas 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 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.
