Read Trafalgar in Spanishwith every sentence explained

Trafalgar by Benito Pérez Galdós was first published in 1873. In Passage you read the full text in the original Spanish, marked advanced and filed under historical fiction.

A street boy from Cádiz. The greatest sea battle of the age. A front-row seat.

Orphaned as a small boy, Gabriel grew up catching crabs on the beaches of Cádiz. At fourteen he becomes the page of Don Alonso Gutiérrez de Cisniega, a kind old navy captain living in Vejer. In October 1805, as the French and Spanish fleets prepare to face Nelson, the old sailor cannot bear to stay at home, whatever his formidable wife Doña Francisca says.

So Don Alonso, his battered shipmate Marcial, nicknamed Half-man for the limbs he has lost, and young Gabriel slip away to join the fleet aboard the mighty Santísima Trinidad. Gabriel, dreaming of glory and of Don Alonso's lovely daughter Rosita, is about to see war up close.

Told by Gabriel as an old man, Trafalgar (1873) is the first of Benito Pérez Galdós's Episodios nacionales, a vast series of novels that brings nineteenth-century Spanish history to life.

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.