¡Maravilloso!

Intensive, personalized, structured and guided real life learning within the warm welcome and comfort of a family and their beautiful home and community, Agualivar (the home/farm/villa), Elisabeth, Fani, Ana - (2 sisters and their friend - our teachers), and Carmen - (Fani and Elisabeth’s mom and professional chef) provided everything needed for an exceptional, unique language/culture learning experience. From the moment Elisabeth picked us up at the Lagos, Malaga bus stop the Spanish instruction began. Easy and available to talk with about anything all day long, someone is around to interact with between classes. The day starts together with breakfast before 3 hours of morning classes. Carmen prepares a gourmet lunch worth a Michelin star. A break before afternoon class allowed time to walk into town or catch up on homework. Afternoon classes integrate interesting artifacts from history with points from yesterday’s excursions into town or language games and puzzles helped us strengthen grammar or sentence structure skills. Ana swings by mid-afternoon to take us into surrounding provinces for a glimpse of Malaga’s culture, exquisite antiquities and entertainment events. Fun and fascinating, we visited ancient caves, tucked away quaint villages in the hills, ancient fallen castles, beaches as well as local typical grocery stores, shops and cafes. The evenings were often met with both exhaustion and exhilaration after returning home to the enticing aromas of Carmen’s next mouth-watering culinary masterpiece. Conversation about the afternoon adventures usually led to a relaxing share of highlights and observations. Nearly 9pm (1700) by this time, we’d head to our private rooms, maybe review the morning class work, do homework for tomorrow or start on one of the end of the week’s assignments. Then sweet dreams. From day one all my dreams were in Spanish and continued to be for about a week after returning to he states!

I learned more in 2 weeks at Agualivar than a year of intermediate Spanish at the college level! Not only do you learn more functional vocab, grammar truths from myths, and sentence construction that is really used, but it’s put into practice so it sticks! Living it at Agualivar made the book, academic, video and podcast info practical, not just theoretical. So the language takes residency in your brain and has a chance to really become a second language if you keep using it when you get home!