White villages: Inés looks for the square in Arcos (A1)
Inés wants to reach the square in Arcos de la Frontera. A clear Spanish story about limewash, the Guadalete, and the name de la Frontera.
Pueblos blancos
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About this article
What you'll learn
Present tense, ser and estar, and town words: casa, calle, cal, río, puente.
Inés walks through Arcos de la Frontera, in Cádiz, because she wants to find her friend and see the Guadalete from the rock. A neighbor explains the limewash: white reflects the sun and protects the wall from rain. The story also names Ronda, with a high bridge over a gorge, Vejer near the Atlantic, and the meaning of de la Frontera: the old border with the Muslim kingdom of Granada.
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.
Los pueblos blancos son pueblos pequeños
newthe white villages are small towns
Ser + noun says what something is. The next sentence switches to estar for where it is, so the pair is worth reading together.
The basic frame for defining a place: X son Y.
Todas las casas son blancas y brillantes
newall the houses are white and bright
Blancas agrees with las casas: feminine and plural. Colour adjectives normally go after the noun, as in las calles blancas and una pintura blanca elsewhere in this text. Here blancas comes after ser instead, which is the other position an adjective can take.
Colour is where adjective agreement shows up first and most often.
El blanco refleja el sol en verano
newwhite reflects the sun in summer
El blanco, with the article, turns the adjective into a noun: the colour white. Spanish does this with every colour: el rojo, el azul.
It carries the practical reason the villages are white, and the article-plus-adjective trick.
Se escuchan campanas de iglesia y pájaros
newchurch bells and birds are heard
Nobody is named as the listener: se escuchan campanas means the bells are heard. The verb agrees with the thing heard, so the plural campanas y pájaros gives escuchan, not escucha. The same pattern gives se venden casas and se habla español.
Shop windows, signs and small ads all over Spain are written this way.
Les gusta caminar por las calles blancas
newthey like walking along the white streets
Gustar works backwards from English: the thing liked is the subject. Les gusta caminar means walking pleases them. With a plural thing it becomes les gustan las calles.
The single structure that most often comes out wrong, and the text hands you a clean example.
No hay muchos coches ni ruido
newthere are not many cars or noise
No hay is the negative of hay, and it never changes for number. After a negative Spanish uses ni where English uses or: no hay coches ni ruido.
Saying what a place does not have is half of describing it.
Key words
Vocabulary that carries the school-day topic.
White (feminine plural)
blancas
white
Blancas is the feminine plural of blanco, agreeing with las casas. The four forms are blanco, blanca, blancos, blancas.
The colour the whole article is named after, and a clean model of the four-form adjective.
Tiled roofs
tejados de tejas
tiled roofs
Tejado is the outside roof you see from the street, and teja is the curved clay tile it is made of. White walls under red tiles are the look of these villages.
Tejado and techo are not the same: techo is the ceiling you see from inside the room.
Narrow streets
calles estrechas
narrow streets
Calle is feminine, so the adjective is estrechas. Narrow streets are not decoration: they keep the walls in shadow through the hottest hours.
Pairs with tejados and paredes as the three words you need to describe any old town.
Old castle
castillo antiguo
old castle
Castillo is masculine, so antiguo keeps the -o. Note the position: antiguo after the noun means old in years; un antiguo castillo before the noun would mean a former castle.
Many of these villages grew around a hilltop castle that guarded the old frontier.
Home-cooked food
comida casera
home-cooked food
Casera comes from casa and agrees with comida, which is feminine. Comida casera on a sign means the kitchen cooks it there, not that it arrives frozen.
Two words that tell you a great deal about a small restaurant before you sit down.
Lime wash
cal
lime wash, whitewash
La cal is the white lime paint the villages are covered in. It is cheap, it protects the wall from rain, and it is the reason the houses are white rather than any other colour.
The one word that explains the whole article, and it does not look like anything in English.
Grammar in context
Patterns from the text worth noticing after reading.
Ser and estar in two sentences
Están en la región de Andalucía
they are small towns, they are in Andalusia
Two sentences in a row about the same subject. Son pueblos pequeños says what they are; están en Andalucía says where they are. Location always takes estar, even when the place never moves.
The commonest ser and estar error is using ser for a country or a region, and this pair shows the split cleanly.
Adjectives agree in gender and number
paredes gruesas
thick walls
Every adjective copies the gender and number of its noun: paredes gruesas (feminine plural), calles estrechas, ventanas pequeñas, castillo antiguo. Four endings, one rule. The adjective usually follows the noun, but a few can go in front and change meaning, as antiguo does in la antigua frontera later in this text.
This article repeats the pattern more than a dozen times, which is what it takes to stick.
Calentarse: to get hot on its own
las casas no se calientan tanto
the houses do not get so hot
Calentar means to heat something; calentarse means to get hot. The se says the houses warm up by themselves, with nobody heating them. Compare se escuchan campanas, where the se hides a person instead.
Spanish marks with se what English marks by changing the verb: heat something, get hot.
Hay: there is, there are
Hay calles estrechas
there are narrow streets
Hay never changes for number: hay una calle, hay calles, hay flores. It says that something exists somewhere, and it takes no definite article. Its negative is no hay, which is in this text too.
Hay and está do different jobs: hay introduces something new, está places something already known.
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