Intensive classes
Twenty hours a week, written for one person
Four hours a day with Doris Zamora, usually eight to twelve, at a table outside her house. No textbook, no syllabus decided in advance. Your material is written the evening before, around what you did that day.
Your class doesn’t exist until the night before
Most language schools hand you a book on Monday and work through it. We don’t have one. Every evening, Doris writes tomorrow’s material around two things: what you are interested in, and what you actually did that day — the animals you saw, the place you visited, the food you tried, the sentence you couldn’t finish at dinner.
You collect it yourself on the way in. There is a print shop on the road between your house and the classroom, and every morning you stop there and pick up the day’s pages — usually between 10 and 30 of them. It is a small errand, and it is also the first Spanish you speak that day.
The reason is simple. Vocabulary that arrives attached to a memory stays. You don’t study the word for “saddle” and hope to meet a horse later — you rode yesterday, so this morning the word has somewhere to live.
Where you study
Classes happen at Doris’s house, at a table outside, looking over the fields where the cattle graze. It is not a school building and not a rented room in a town you’ll never see again.
That matters more than it sounds. You walk to class past the same houses every morning, you greet the same neighbours, and the people who wave back are the people you will be speaking Spanish with all afternoon.
Who teaches you
Doris Zamora co-founded the program in 2018 and has been the teacher in charge ever since. For the last couple of years she has taught every student herself. In earlier years other teachers joined her, mainly for younger students.
She is also the person you speak to before you arrive. A short call, in whatever Spanish you have, so she knows your level and what you want out of the weeks. There is no test on your first day — by the time you sit down, your first lesson has already been written for you.
One-to-one, or a small group
Which one you get depends on your level and who else is enrolled that week.
- Groups are small. Never more than five people, and everyone in the room is at your level.
- Often it is just you. If nobody else is at your level that week, you study one-to-one.
- The price is the same either way. It is priced per student, so you are not charged more for ending up alone with the teacher.
All levels, from complete beginner to advanced. If you arrive with no Spanish at all, that is normal here — many students do.
How the week runs
Twenty hours of class, Monday to Friday. Weekends are yours.
- 8:00 to 12:00 — class, with a short break around ten
- 1:00 to 5:00 — when an activity is planned for the morning, class moves to the afternoon instead
- Every morning — you collect your printed pages from the print shop on the walk to class
- Before you arrive — a level call with Doris, so week one starts at the right place
- Study materials — budgeted separately, around $25 a week
- Weekends — free. Most students use them to travel
What ends up on the page
Students often ask what all that paper actually contains. It is not grammar drills printed off the internet. It is the verb you needed at the corral yesterday, the past tense of the thing you tried to tell your host mother at dinner, a reading built around the farm you visited, and the five words you asked for and forgot.
By Friday you have a stack of paper that no other student in the world has, because no other student had your week.
Come and see for yourself
Tell us where your Spanish is now and what you want to be able to say. We answer the same day, usually within a few hours.
Ask us about a week