Two shoeshine girls and a newspaper vendor survive in the Mapocho neighborhood of Santiago. While looking for better luck, Maruja becomes involved with a businessman who helps her become a famous singer. Meanwhile, the two shoeshine boys happen to come across some money from a bank robbery, changing their luck.

The hard-working owner of a circus, Euríspides Chamorro (Eugenio Retes), goes to Santiago in search of his son, a medical student, but finds to his surprise that he has dropped out of school and no one knows his whereabouts. To make matters worse, one of his employees snatches the circus from him, starting an adventure to recover everything and to convince his son to become a doctor.

The head of a plumbing and electrical workshop is a victim of bureaucracy in public offices and is unable to pay his debts, so his workshop is closed. With a lot of luck he manages to get a repair job in the house of a minister, then he enters to work in a ministry, also becoming a bureaucrat. Taking advantage of his friendship with the minister, he is promoted to become chief archivist, but he realizes the routine that is filling the job and resigns.

After arriving on a ship in Valparaíso, Bohr meets Euríspides Chamorro, with whom he begins a trip through Chile, full of sketches, most of them led by the comedy duo Los Capo- rales.

The whaling captain, Antonio Grez, meets in a bar in the port of Valparaiso a very beautiful woman who lives haunted by the tragic premonition that fate will give her a violent death. Grez takes command of a whaler bound for Cape Horn and Antarctica. In Punta Arenas, the owner of the whaling company embarks on together with his fiancee, who is none other than the mysterious woman with whom Grez has fallen in love. The final route of the ship is the 'Land of Desolation', a place on which there is a curse and everyone knows that, for centuries, is has been fulfilled inexorably.