Read Zaragoza in Spanishwith every sentence explained

Zaragoza by Benito Pérez Galdós was first published in 1874. In Passage you read the full text in the original Spanish, marked advanced and filed under historical fiction.

A city that will not surrender: not to the French, not to hunger, not to fire.

December 1808. Gabriel Araceli and three fellow prisoners, among them the garrulous Don Roque, slip free of a French prisoner column and limp into Zaragoza with a few coppers between them. They spend their first night in the ruins of the Santa Engracia monastery, blown up in the first siege, and are taken in by José de Montoria, a big-hearted farmer, just as Napoleon's army closes in for a second assault.

Gabriel joins the city's defenders alongside Montoria's son Agustín, a gentle seminary student who has secretly fallen in love with Mariquilla, daughter of old Candiola, the most hated miser in town. As bombs rain down and the fighting spreads from the walls into the streets and houses, every loyalty is put to the test.

The sixth of Benito Pérez Galdós's Episodios nacionales, Saragossa is one of the most vivid portraits ever written of a city under siege.

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.