In a noble mansion in seventeenth century Seville, young Cayetano enters as an accountant in the service of Don Manuel de Paredes, a nobleman who has invested his last assets in a ship bound for the Indies. One day the fatal news arrives: the ship is shipwrecked and its precious cargo is lost at the bottom of the sea. The old palace and the family belongings are mortgaged and the future is uncertain? In this novel we will know a Seville numbed in its baroque beauty and past glory; the agitated kingdom of Mekinez in Barbary; the hidden life in the city of the cruel sultan Mulay Ismail; the captivity and the surprising encounter between curious characters in the midst of great troubles. The author also reconstructs the surprising story of the famous Christ of Medinaceli, snatched in 1681 from the weakened Spanish garrison of La Mamora, in North Africa.