The Spanish reading room

Cuentos de la selva

Horacio Quiroga Spanish In the original

Enter Horacio Quiroga’s Cuentos de la selva: eight jungle tales written for his children, in the original Spanish. Word meanings and English translations help you stay inside the story. Start with a complete free tale, then explore the collection at your own pace.

Open the Spanish room

The eight, shortest first

17,546 words across 1,298 sentences.

Tap any word for its dictionary form and meaning; tap a sentence for the English. «Las medias de los flamencos» is free, entire, on its editorial reading page and asks for no account, and the opening scene of «La tortuga gigante» comes free after it. The rest of the shelf is part of the library — €5 a month or €39 a year, and the one subscription opens the Spanish tales, the German, the French and the Russian ones alike.

Shortest first, because that is the order a learner should meet them in — not the order Quiroga printed them in. «Las medias de los flamencos» is 1,401 words and reads in a sitting; «El paso del Yabebirí» is 3,348. What each one asks of a reader — dictionary words, how many appear only once, words per sentence — is counted at Quiroga, counted.

Why these eight, and why 1918

Quiroga wrote these tales for his own children and first published them in Buenos Aires in 1918.

Because they are among the very few works of literature a beginner in Spanish can read entire and in the original within a few months of starting. Quiroga wrote them for children — his own — so the sentences are short and the vocabulary is concrete: animals, a river, a wound, a debt paid. And they are real literature rather than a graded reader written to a word list: nothing here is simplified, retold or invented, and the shelf holds no adapted text.

The printing is the 1918 first edition, which is very nearly modern Spanish. What it does carry is the written accent the Real Academia only dropped in 1959 — fué, dió, vió, fuí — and the old accented preposition á. Every one of them has today's spelling beside it, so a word you already know cannot hide behind an accent that is no longer printed. These are American Spanish tales: vos and seseo, the Spanish of the Río de la Plata, not Castilian.

What is on each tale's page

Its length in Spanish and its English title; how many minutes it takes to read at a learner's pace; how many dictionary words it uses and how many of them appear exactly once; its chapters; and where it stands on the shelf against the seven others. «Las medias de los flamencos» carries the whole tale, Spanish against English, sentence by sentence — and a page of its own for every sentence in it. «La tortuga gigante» carries its free opening scene the same way.

Questions people ask before they start

How many Spanish words do you need to read a book? · What level is «Cuentos de la selva»? · Can you learn Spanish just by reading? — each answered with this shelf's own numbers rather than a round figure.

The other four rooms

This is one of five rooms in the same house, built on the same reader. The others hold the Russian classics — Chekhov, Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, with seven of them free — nine German texts from Grimm, Hebel and Kafka, eight French tales from Perrault and Daudet, and eight Italian tales from Collodi to Pirandello. A reader who comes to Spanish from Spanish rather than to it wants la sala rusa or la sala alemana instead.

Some complete works are free without an account in the interactive reader; other books offer free openings. Free lesson samples are also available. A free account keeps your saved words and progress across devices. Free reading and membership.