Read Misericordia in Spanishwith every sentence explained

Misericordia by Benito Pérez Galdós was first published in 1897. In Passage you read the full text in the original Spanish, marked advanced and filed under historical fiction. It runs to about 83,600 words.

She begs in secret so her mistress can keep up appearances.

In the poorest corners of 1890s Madrid, outside the church of San Sebastián, a crowd of beggars fights over every coin. Among them stands Benina, an old servant with a kind face and endless patience. No one at home knows she is there.

Benina works for Doña Paca, a once-wealthy widow ruined by her own extravagance, who still lives as if she were a lady. To feed her, Benina begs each morning and invents a generous priest, "Don Romualdo", to explain where the money comes from. Her only friend on the church steps is Almudena, a blind beggar from Morocco who loves her in his own extraordinary way.

Benito Pérez Galdós' Compassion (1897) is one of his greatest novels and Benina one of the most luminous characters in Spanish literature. Full of the lively, colourful speech of the Madrid streets, it is funny, moving and deeply humane.

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.