Learn Spanish (Latin America): El viaje duró tres días.

El viaje duró tres días.

The trip lasted three days.

Breakdown of El viaje duró tres días.

Questions & Answers about El viaje duró tres días.

Why use duró instead of tardó, since this lesson is about tardar?

While tardar means to take a certain amount of time to do something, durar simply means to last. You use tardar en when focusing on the time it takes to complete an action, but you use durar to talk about the length of an event itself, like a trip, a movie, or a meeting.

Why is duró in the preterite tense here instead of the imperfect (duraba)?

The preterite (duró) is used because the trip is viewed as a completed event in the past. Stating a specific, closed timeframe like tres días triggers the preterite because you are looking at the total completed time of the action from beginning to end.

I always forget the gender of words like viaje. Is there a rule to remember it?

Yes! The word is masculine (el viaje). A very reliable rule of thumb is that almost all Spanish nouns ending in -aje are masculine. Other common examples include el mensaje (the message) and el paisaje (the landscape).