Paco de Lucía

Spanish online reading and listening practice - level B1

Born as Francisco Sánchez Gómez in 1947, Paco de Lucía was brought up within the heart of traditional flamenco in Algeciras. He was a pioneering guitarist who founded the new fusion flamenco genre with his forays into classical, Latin and jazz music. After an outstanding career that gave him global renown he died unexpectedly in 2014, leaving behind an incredible musical legacy.

If you are wondering about Paco's "stage name", where he grew up children with very common names were further identified by adding their mother's name ("name of child" de "name of mother"). Paco's mother's name was Lucía and Paco is a diminutive of Francisco. Which Paco is this? Es Paco de Lucía... This reading and listening exercise can help you practise gender of nouns ending in -ista, shorter forms of ordinal numbers and using demasiado, bastante, suficiente, poco, tanto and mucho to express quantity.

Text and audio by Silvia Píriz.

Exercise: Paco de Lucía

Listen to the audio, then read the transcript. Click any phrase for the translation and links to related grammar lessons which you can add to your KwizIQ notebook to practise later.