Mario, a young and uprooted Menorcan fisherman, falls in love with Irene, a Barcelona socialite who spends her holidays on the island with her young daughter. After the ambiguous initial relationship, victim of the rumors and slander, she decides to leave him. Mario, unable to resign himself, follows her to Barcelona, where he finds her imprisoned in a marriage lacking in love, in which her husband, a rich and powerful industrialist related to shady business, holds her under the threat of separating her from her daughter.
At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, the nun Maria is forced to flee her convent. She takes refuge in a brothel, until it is liberated by a woman's anarchist group. Maria joins the group and eventually goes to the front. The women's group faces the problems of fighting not only the nationalists, but also factions on the left seeking to impose a more traditional military structure.