Instituto Cervantes
Summary
The Instituto Cervantes is a non-profit Spanish organization developed by the Spanish government to promote the study of Spanish language and Culture. On their website, you can find self-guided courses for levels A1 to C1. Sixteen 30-hour courses cover 48 topics, each with videos, reading material, and interactive exercises. There is a 3 month limit on access to courses, and a 3-week limit on the individual 10-hour lessons. You can also purchase an affordable 1-year membership to their library of digital content, which has thousands of books, audiobooks, databases, online dictionaries, and more for studying Spanish. Although the user interface is not very modern, the Instituto Cervantes has some of the few online platforms that meticulously takes you through each of the CEFR levels with structured, high-quality, and interactive lessons. If you know you can motivate yourself to self-study and have some spare cash to invest in your learning, it will probably be time and money well spent. Unfortunately, each course must be purchased separately and they are quite expensive. You can take a look at the archived lessons here and decide if you want to purchase the full course to provide more structure. Beginners may want to download the Readlang Chrome extension to help with translation, as most of the webpages are entirely in Spanish. Also, nothing beats learning through speaking the language, so check out italki, SpanishVIP, and Baselang for online Spanish tutors.
To see all of our self-study guides, favorite programs, online subscriptions, apps, podcasts, and YouTubes for the language you’re learning, look for your language in the table below.

Hi Abe! Instituto Cervantes is definitely a Spain-focused program. Standard Spanish in Spain. 🙂
Can I ask what the word was that you used? Was the class primarily focused on a particular register or variety of Spanish? Were you able to learn about Spanish-speaking cultures in Latin America or was it focused more on Spain?
Hey Jeff,
Shoot, I would hate it too, if a teacher decides to treat me like that! Hope it was a one-off thing. Good to know that the course material is solid, because that’s what we have felt, too. Don’t stop learning, though, just because of one rude teacher from Cervantes. Kay
I’ve been taking a class at the Cervantes Institute in Albuquerque NM. I like the course material, but I’ve had problems with the instructor. In one case I used a Spanish word from the book to answer to an oral exercise. She then spent the next 1/2 minute in class degrading me stating that the word didn’t exist and that I just made it up. That night she realized her mistake and then next day she told me (in private) that the word did exist. There was no apology for her behavior. I felt abused and degraded by the very person that I has paying to help me learn another language.