Just a few minutes before the end of the nineteenth century, in front of the cathedral of Santiago de Chile a beggar faces his destiny for the last time.
It is Julius Popper, a Romanian engineer who, in 1860, took possession of the coast of Tierra del Fuego on behalf of Queen Carmen Sylba. Forty years later, Popper, elderly and ruined, recalls the details of his rise and fall in his poor old age.