A beautiful teenage shepherdess named Adega sleeps one night with a mysterious pilgrim in a barn of impoverished and superstitious Galicia of the nineteenth century. The overwhelming fanaticism of the villagers motivates them to consider the outsider an envoy of Satan, reason why they deny him the lodging. The pilgrim, on the other hand, will react by cursing the people with plague and misery.

Ignacio Costa is a tyrannical businessman with a conflictive personal life. He has a large family, a woman he abuses and humiliates and five children with whom he does the same, except for Mariana one of the girls. Tired of so many vexations, his wife will begin to influence his children until together they will plot the murder of the father

Madrid, Spring 1913. During a visit to the casino, a beautiful 20 year-old woman catches the eye of a 50 year-old rich widower. But the gamble he is about to commit is far greater than he suspects.

In the medieval Castile, Don Tello de Buinesa, the boastful feudal lord, lives with his three sons and their beautiful wives.

In Spain of the 1960s, a poor family of quinquis - a nomadic ethnic group with a tradition as old as that of the gypsises of Spain but with even more obscure origins - have a nomadic life marked by poverty. The son, Eleuterio Sánchez Rodriguez, nicknamed "El Lute", steals some chickens and is condemned to six months in jail. El Lute moves to the slum outskirts of Madrid with his common law wife, Chelo, starting an itinerant life as a peddler of pots and pans and living in a quinqui shantytown. He gradually embarks upon as life of petty criminality, eventually participating in the theft of a jewelry store during which a bystander is killed.