The High Mountain: Spanish A1 Reading
On a hot day in Tenerife, Marcos walks up Teide for cooler air. Teide is a volcano and the highest mountain in Spain.
La montaña alta
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About this article
What you'll learn
present tense, the verb querer, and words for mountains and walking
Marcos is hot on the coast of Tenerife and wants cooler air. He walks a path on Teide with water and food, without ropes or a helmet. The pines stay green, the air gets cooler, and he turns back before the summit. Teide is a volcano and the highest mountain in Spain.
After reading
Article learning block
Phrases, words, grammar, and quick practice from this text.
Phrases for training
Add useful phrases to SRS or mark them as already known.
hace fresco
newit is cool (weather)
Hace fresco describes pleasant coolness: not cold, not hot. Weather uses hacer, not ser or estar.
Hace frío, hace calor, hace fresco: the whole weather set works this way.
van a la montaña
newmany people go to the mountains
Movement takes a: van a la montaña. Location takes en: en la montaña hace fresco. Both are in this text.
Getting a and en the wrong way round is the commonest preposition slip at A1.
viven muchos animales
newmany animals live
Viven is the third person plural of vivir. Spanish often puts the verb before the subject: viven muchos animales.
That word order is normal in Spanish and impossible in English, so it is worth noticing while you read.
subir una montaña
newclimbing a mountain
The infinitive works as the subject of the sentence: subir una montaña es un deporte. English uses the -ing form there.
Any Spanish infinitive can be a subject: caminar es bueno, leer es útil.
la montaña más alta de España
newthe highest mountain in Spain
The superlative is el/la + noun + más + adjective + de: la montaña más alta de España.
Note de where English uses in. This text runs the pattern five times, with four different endings: de España, del mundo, de América, de todas.
desde la montaña se ve
newfrom the mountain you can see
Se ve is impersonal, and the verb agrees with the thing seen: se ve todo, but se pueden ver otros montes.
That plural agreement is the part learners miss, and both forms sit in the same paragraph here.
El aire en la montaña es muy limpio
newthe air on the mountain is very clean
Muy is an adverb and never changes: muy limpio, muy limpia, muy limpios.
Do not confuse muy (very, before an adjective) with mucho (a lot, with a noun or a verb).
No pierden sus hojas en invierno
newthey do not lose their leaves in winter
Perder changes its stem in the present: the e becomes ie in pierdo, pierdes, pierde, pierden, but not in nosotros perdemos. The same thing happens with o and ue: volar gives vuelan, and poder gives se pueden ver. All three are in this text.
A dictionary lists perder, volar and poder, so pierden, vuelan and pueden look like different verbs until you know the change.
Key words
Vocabulary that carries the school-day topic.
Snow
nieve
snow
La nieve is snow, and it is feminine in Spanish.
Nieve gives the verb nevar, to snow: en la montaña nieva en invierno.
Bear
oso
bear
El oso is a bear; the brown one is el oso pardo.
Spain really does have wild brown bears, in the Cordillera Cantábrica in the north.
Eagle
águila
eagle
Águila is feminine but takes el in the singular, because it begins with a stressed a: el águila, las águilas.
Same rule as el agua and el aula, and the adjective still agrees in the feminine.
Pine tree
pino
pine tree
El pino is a pine. With el abeto, the fir, it stays green all year.
Evergreens are the reason a mountain still looks green in January.
Hiking
senderismo
hiking
El senderismo is walking marked trails. It is not alpinismo, which means climbing high mountains with ropes.
The word comes from sendero, a path, which also appears in this text.
Backpack
mochila
backpack
La mochila is a backpack, carried on the back. In Latin America it is also the ordinary word for a school bag.
An everyday word well beyond the mountains.
Valley
valle
valley
El valle is the low ground between mountains. It is masculine despite ending in -e.
It turns up all over the Spanish-speaking map: the Valle de Arán in the Pyrenees, the Valle Sagrado in Peru.
Mountain range
cordillera
mountain range
Una cordillera is a long chain of mountains, larger than a sierra.
The Andes are the longest in the world, and northern Spain has the Cordillera Cantábrica.
Grammar in context
Patterns from the text worth noticing after reading.
Adjective after the noun
los osos pardos
the brown bears
A descriptive adjective normally follows the noun in Spanish: los osos pardos, not los pardos osos.
It also agrees in gender and number: oso pardo, osos pardos, montaña alta, montañas altas.
Existential hay
Hay osos, lobos y águilas
there are bears, wolves and eagles
Hay never changes: the same form covers one thing and many. There is no plural form of it.
Hay introduces something new; use está or están for something already known: el Teide está en Tenerife.
Impersonal se
Caminar por los senderos se llama senderismo
walking the trails is called hiking
Se llama means is called, with nobody named as doing the naming: se + a third person verb.
The same se runs through this text in se ve and se pueden ver. It is how Spanish avoids naming a subject.
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