Each morning, whatever the day, four friends meet at a bar to have some beers and fix the world their own way, by criticizing and ranting against everything and everyone. They have something in common: they are all unemployed. Well, all but one.
The story of the Balmis Expedition, funded by the King of Spain, to bring the smallpox vaccine to Spanish America.
Samuel is an old hippie musician who settled in Formentera in the 1970s, when King Crimson and other British rock bands frequented the island. There he lives austerely, in a ramshackle house without electric light or unnecessary luxuries, and plays the banjo in a friends' club. Until one day, after many years, he receives the unexpected visit of his daughter Anna and his grandson Marc. Anna, unemployed for some time, says she has had to accept a job in France and is forced to leave her little son on the island with grandfather Samuel.
As a severe drought punishes the vast expanses of rice fields in eastern Spain, the natural region of Laguna Blanca is named a Nature Preserve. A prestigious biologist, Ricardo, arrives in San Pedro to protect it. His family, however, is going through tough times but Ricardo is convinced that a change in their lives will help them move on. And it’s also an opportunity to get back to his roots, to his origins, to where he grew up as a boy and to reclaim this spot that had been buried in his fondest memories. Ricardo’s mission is to hinder the abusive and illegal use that everyone makes of the lagoon. But pressure and threats from the locals just keep getting worse. They consider Ricardo a traitor because all they are trying to do is defend their existence and their livelihood. Ricardo eventually comes to the realization that his life and that of his family are in danger.
Since 1997, retired high school teacher Bruce Farrer had been giving his students a task: to write a letter to themselves about how they imagine their lives in twenty years. He keeps all those letters himself and, twenty years later, he sends these to them.
