Juanita, the daughter of an English father from Gibraltar and an Andalusian mother, recounts with humour her sorrows and desires as well as the life of the women around her: her sister Helena, educated at the Lycée and searching for her freedom; Esther, her close Sephardic friend, who devotes her life to an impossible love affair with a Moroccan man; and Hamruch, the loyal Moroccan maid. The backdrop to these lives: the Spanish Civil War with the entry of the Jalifeñas troops in Tangiers and the Second World War with the arrival of refugees from Europe. Juanita – one of the last witnesses of the "paradise" that was international Tangiers where different cultures and religions coexisted, at the same time as being the last vestige of colonialism – ends up alone in the city that, after Moroccan independence in 1956, starts to return to its Arab roots.