A quietly comic look at a Madrid housewife's attempt to escape from her mundane and tedious existence. Encountering mostly impersonal bureaucracy, she has no specific plan for what she wants to do, just the fervent hope that she will find the adventure she's so desperately seeking.
Studying under a disciple of Aleister Crowley, the leader of an upper class group invokes a supernatural force that slowly devours the village of Marienbad and its inhabitants, threatening to spread beyond its geographical limits. The mayor from the town nearby commissions the building of a dam which would flood the valley and therefore submerge the village forever sealing the evil force under water after leader and his followers were incapacitated to be kept from escaping. However, fate ensured the leader's freedom as he remained in the depths when the waters covered Marienbad. Now 40 years later an array of disappearances and deaths in mysterious circumstances are threatening the town next to the reservoir that now covers Marienbad.
Joaquin comes back to Granada in the eighties trying to find out about something happened when he was a child and the Spanish Civil War was going on. He helped an unknown man who survived after being executed. He finds the man, Galapago, who is now quite old, poor and with almost no memory. Joaquin takes care of him and finds hints that point to Galapago as Federico García Lorca.