Madrid, 1935. A young American woman arrives at the Residencia de Estudiantes, where the creme de la creme of Republican intellectuals get together. Real and fictional characters meet on the city's streets. The famous evenings spend in the 'colina de los chopos' attract arists, musicians, dandys, poets, dreamers and students from all over. This glamourous, crystalline atmosphere explodes all at once when the body of a student turns up, floating in a nearby irrigation canal. This is also the start of an intense love story between the newly-arrived young American woman and a renowned, sceptical professor whom life has placed at a tricky crossroads. A romance as passionate as it is prohibited, that runs parallel to the shadow cast by the crime. The protagonists are swept up in a web of intrigue, scandal and state secrets of enormous magnitude that could cost them their lives...