Read Pepita Jiménez in Spanishwith every sentence explained

Pepita Jiménez by Juan Valera was first published in 1874. In Passage you read the full text in the original Spanish, marked intermediate and filed under romance. It runs to about 56,100 words.

He is about to become a priest. She is about to marry his father.

Luis de Vargas, twenty-two years old and fresh from the seminary, comes home to his Andalusian village for a few weeks before his ordination. In letters to his uncle, the dean, he describes country life with a serious young man's disdain, and especially the woman everyone is talking about: Pepita Jiménez, a beautiful twenty-year-old widow whom his own father, Don Pedro, hopes to marry.

Luis insists he admires her only as a model of virtue. But his letters grow longer, more troubled and more full of Pepita's green eyes, and the whole village seems to notice what he cannot admit.

Juan Valera's Pepita Jiménez (1874) is one of the most charming love stories in Spanish, told with wit, warmth and gentle irony. It inspired an opera by Isaac Albéniz and remains a favourite with intermediate learners.

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.