Luis, an unmarried, middle-aged, Barcelona businessman, carries out his mother's dying wish to be buried in the family crypt in Segovia. He has her bones exhumed from a pantheon in Barcelona and heads by car to the Castile and León city. In the middle of a lonely road, he stops and gets out of the car, recalling the same landscape at a moment in his childhood when he was being brought up to spend part of his summer vacation with his maternal grandmother in Segovia during the fateful summer of 1936. He sees his parents before him, trying to soothe him after a bout of carsickness. Just days before they were to pick him up, a military uprising cut Segovia off from the Republican part of Spain and Luis found himself trapped in the menacing environment of his mother's Nationalist relatives for the duration of the war.