The Peralta brothers work in the countryside the Alto Paraná. There they will meet subhuman working conditions. Finally, the workers rise and harshly punish their exploiters.

During the first Carlist war, Beatriz, daughter of an Isabeline colonel, secretly marries a Carlist captain who gets killed. Years later she returns to Rubiercos, an Asturian lost hamlet where she left her daughter, to find a troubled village where traditional rural lifestyle is threatened by the emerging coal mining industry and a new way of life darkening the river waters.