Spanish · Intermediate
Read María in Spanishwith every sentence explained
Jorge Isaacs · 1867
Free to start · iPhone, iPad & Mac
About the book
María by Jorge Isaacs was first published in 1867. In Passage you read the full text in the original Spanish, marked intermediate and filed under romance. It runs to about 88,100 words.
A first love in a valley of paradise. A shadow no one dares to name.
After six years of school in Bogotá, young Efraín comes home to his family's hacienda in Colombia's lush Cauca Valley. Waiting for him is María, the orphaned cousin his father took in as a child, now grown into a quiet, luminous young woman. Among rivers, orchards and mountain evenings, their love blooms in shy glances, shared books and flowers left by a window.
But María has inherited her mother's mysterious illness, and Efraín's father has other plans: a medical degree in faraway London. Every happy day feels borrowed.
Jorge Isaacs' María (1867) is the most widely read Spanish-American novel of the nineteenth century, a cornerstone of Colombian school reading and the inspiration for many films and TV series. Tender, lyrical and full of the colours of the tropics, it is a love story readers have cried over for generations.
- Author
- Jorge Isaacs
- First published
- 1867
- Language
- Spanish
- Level
- Intermediate
- Genre
- Romance
- Length
- About 88,100 words
How it opens
Era yo niño aún cuando me alejaron de la casa paterna para que diera principio a mis estudios en el colegio del doctor Lorenzo María Lleras, establecido en Bogotá hacía pocos años, y famoso en toda la República por aquel tiempo.
En la noche víspera de mi viaje, después de la velada, entró a mi cuarto una de mis hermanas, y sin decirme una sola palabra cariñosa, porque los sollozos le embargaban la voz, cortó de mi cabeza unos cabellos: cuando salió, habían rodado por mi cuello algunas lágrimas suyas.
Reading María 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.
