Within the communicative approach in teaching, we have the development of the four communicative skills of language: listening, writing, reading and speaking. Literature has never been seen as an integrating tool of these skills, however, recently there have been several attempts to give literature the importance it deserves. In the present work we will see how literature is not on one side of real life, but it is an integral part of it. It is language’s most creative and original expression with a legitimate place in a foreign language classroom, where the student can be faced, through the language it models, with the culture it represents. Teachers of Spanish as a Second Language, in their role as guides in the reading process, can extract from literature different linguistic and cultural skills that will benefit students, not only in their academic life, but also at a professional and social level.