This novel narrates little more than two decades of the life of Chinto, a lad of Outeiro, a village lost in the mountains of Lugo, who reveals his childhood, his eventful world that he tries to understand using the model behaviour that the father provides that is none other than his great-grandfather, namesake, tireless conqueror of women, adventurer,
pirate, clandestine lover fled to Brazil unexpectedly, without having come to know their only legitimate child. It is portrayed the world that surrounds the child, the people and events that marked his way of contemplating reality, school, religion, love, an inconvenient love that ties him with his birthplace and from where he will eventually flee. He will leave the village in order to forget the limited world of restricted relationships. He will know the fishing village of Cedeira, different people, a different world of open sea, before going to Brazil, fleeing from impossible love affairs and with the aim of finding the man who was his vital point of reference. Throughout the novel we will know the lives of different people who are around Chinto.