Intermediate Spanish: Places and Travel

Hone your language skills on a journey through the Spanish speaking world

On this four-week course from The Open University, you’ll discover the geographical diversity of the Worlds of Spanish and explore their fascinating landscapes.

You’ll learn to describe places, including locations, main features, climate, their environmental surroundings, atmosphere, and social traits. You’ll be encouraged to apply your newly learnt knowledge to share a description of your favourite place with other learners, friends, and family.

Discover what makes places unique

You’ll analyse the distinctive characteristics that define how we perceive different cities and urban life across the Worlds of Spanish and draw comparisons between them. You’ll also consider different elements of their infrastructure, like transport networks and sustainability.

Using linguistic structures like the relative superlative, you’ll be able to express why you think cities excel and share your thoughts about them using appropriate verbs.

Explore the influence of economic migration on the Spanish language

Rural-urban migration continues to mark the rapid growth of cities and gradual depopulation of rural areas especially in Spain and Latin America. You’ll be able to interpret facts and figures in Spanish using percentages, indefinite pronouns, and collective nouns to help you understand the evolution of rural-urban migration and current economic trends and initiatives.

Plan your future adventures

After learning about the geographic diversity of the Worlds of Spanish, you’ll be ready to explore different options for a travel adventure of your choice.

You’ll have the skills to consider where you’d like to visit, and research and share your plans using the future tense, prepositions of place, and the structures you learnt throughout this course.

This course is designed for those with a good basic knowledge of Spanish (fully at Level A2 of the Common European Framework of Reference), who would like to improve their competence in the language and deepen their understanding of different cultures.

• The world around us
• Welcome to 'Places and Travel'
• Geographical diversity
• The surrounding environment and its features
• Spanish as a variable-stress language
• Putting it all together
• Summary of the week
• Life in the city
• Welcome to Week 2
• Making comparisons
• Distinctive features of cities
• What do you like?
• El transporte sostenible
• Summary of the week
• Rural–urban migration
• Welcome to Week 3
• Transport in rural areas
• Rural–urban migration
• Presenting data
• Rural industry
• Summary of the week
• Time to travel
• Welcome to Week 4
• Wildlife
• Journeys
• Pronunciation of the letter ´x´
• The future
• Summary of the week