How to use prepositions of place and movement in Spanish?

Has someone ever asked you for directions? I’m terrible at giving them, but one thing I can do well is tell people how near or far a place is. And for that, I use the preposition a:

Now, imagine you’re meeting your friends for coffee and one of them says:

Here, we’re indicating a situation based on a reference point; in this case, the coffee shop entrance.

You can also use the preposition a (meaning to) to indicate the ending point of a journey or movement, or the direction towards a place:

You’ll frequently see a used after verbs that express movement to indicate final destination or direction. If you don’t know these verbs, make sure you check out our list in the link above!

When talking about direction, we use hacia (meaning towards). This is a useful word if you want to tell people where they need to go to or to where something is headed:

Similar to hacia, we can use the preposition para (meaning to) to indicate a destination in space:

Just like you can use de and desdeto indicate the starting moment of an action, we can also use them to indicate the starting point of a journey or movement.

There’s a slight difference we need to consider here: although both prepositions can be used to indicate the starting point, desde emphasizes the movement away from or distance from the point of origin. In the second example, the speaker wants to emphasize the distance traveled as opposed to only stating the point of origin.

The preposition de can also be used in Spanish to indicate the place of something:

If you want to indicate where a particular journey ends, use a or hasta to do it!

Did you know en (meaning in, at, on) is one of the most common prepositions in Spanish? We use it all the time when we want to indicate the general location of a person or object:

Did you notice how there are many uses of this preposition? The good news is, in Spanish, you only have to remember one preposition instead of three different ones (on/in/at) like in English!

Entre (meaning between) is a preposition that can be used to indicate an intermediate place:

This versatile Spanish preposition is the equivalent of the English “through” and can also mean “around” to indicate an approximate place.

If you want to say that something is “on” or “above” something else, then you can say it accurately by using sobre:

This preposition is close in meaning to “in front of” or “facing,” so we always use it to indicate location:

With this one, we can talk about the location of people or things “under” or “beneath” something else:

This preposition is used if you want to specify that something or someone is located in contact with or leaning against something or someone else.

As a preposition of place, tras is similar in meaning to detrás de (meaning behind):

Finally, in Spanish, we have a set of compound prepositions that are very useful when we want to indicate the location of a person, animal, or object in relation to another one:

I’m sure you want to know more about compound prepositions. That’s why we’ve created this cheat-sheet with useful combinations and examples of Spanish compound prepositions.