In a village threatened by a wildfire, the romance between two teenagers rekindles the forbidden love that united their mothers decades earlier, unleashing family secrets, violence, and decisions that will change their lives in a single night.
Summer, 1988. In Las Gargantillas, a small village surrounded by pine forests, everyone is on edge as a wildfire advances through the mountains, turning the sky thick with smoke and ash.
Cristina, a sixteen-year-old from Madrid, arrives in the village to spend the local festivities. On her very first night, she meets Joaquín, a nineteen-year-old spending the summer there with his family. Between open-air dances, swims in the river, and late-night walks, an immediate attraction sparks between them. They slip away from their friends and share a first kiss in the doorway of Cristina’s house, beginning an intense and sudden romance.
But their encounter awakens a past no one wanted to name.
Ana María, Cristina’s mother, immediately recognizes the boy’s name: Joaquín is the son of Sole, the woman with whom she once shared a secret love in her youth. Her memories reconstruct that story: two teenage girls who grew up together in the same village, whose friendship turned into a forbidden love in the Spain of that time. Pressure from family and society forced them apart. Years later, they managed to reunite and shared a single night before Sole disappeared from her life.
Now Sole has returned to the village, married to Ernesto, a violent and controlling man. When the two women see each other again, the past resurfaces with full force. Ana María realizes that Sole is trapped in a relationship marked by fear. While their children begin to fall in love without knowing this history, the two women secretly meet again and acknowledge that their bond never truly disappeared.
Meanwhile, Paco, a local boy who has been silently in love with Cristina for years, watches from a distance as she falls for someone else.
The tension explodes on the main night of the festivities. As the fire spreads through the hills and smoke begins to blanket the valley, everyone’s decisions accelerate. After reconnecting and admitting that their love is still alive, Ana María and Sole decide to leave the village together and seek help at a shelter for abused women, finally escaping Ernesto’s violence.
That same night, Cristina waits for Joaquín at the fair, but he never shows up. She doesn’t know he has been caught in the family conflict triggered by his mother’s escape and his father’s fury. Convinced he has stood her up, she drinks too much and ends up alone in the crowd.
A local boy tries to take advantage of her vulnerable state and drags her into a dark street to assault her. Paco, who has followed her all night from a distance, intervenes in desperation and strikes the boy with a stone, killing him.
With the fire drawing ever closer to the village, Paco flees with Cristina on a stolen motorcycle and takes her to the Civil Guard station in a neighboring town. There, he tells her that he is responsible for what happened and insists that this is what she must say when questioned. Before anyone can stop him, he starts the motorcycle again and disappears into the night.
As the wildfire consumes the mountains, Paco ventures alone into the forest, leaving his fate uncertain.
In a single night marked by fire, love, and violence, the lives of two generations are forever bound by the same story.
RELEVANT INFORMATION: Marian Peyró is a Spanish writer whose work focuses primarily on short stories and contemporary fiction. Her writing is characterized by morally ambiguous characters and atmospheres of tension, positioned between literary fiction and noir storytelling. She has won several awards for short fiction.
She made her novel debut with The Fires, a multi-perspective work that intertwines two forbidden love stories across different time periods. The novel sensitively explores themes such as female desire, abuse, homophobia in rural environments, and the legacy of family secrets.
Its narrative structure—alternating points of view—and its steadily building tension toward a tragic climax make it excellent material for an audiovisual adaptation as a miniseries or film, with a strong ensemble of female characters.
AUDIOVISUAL POTENTIAL: TV Series, Miniseries, Film, TV Movie
AVAILABLE LANGUAGES: Spanish
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