In the coastal autonomous city of Melilla (located in north Africa but belonging Spain), Mateo is a Civil Guard with the task to protect the barb wire which divides the city of the rest of Africa to avoid the entering of African immigrants to Spain. During a mass attempt a night, Mateo is witness about as his partner Javi hits with his club in the head to an immigrant named Tatu, falling of the barb wire to the ground and dying in the fall, causing the rage in the rest of immigrants that seen it. At the same time, in a reservation of Mbouma, Senegal, Gonzalo is a Spaniard working as external advisor to prevent the killing of elephants by poachers, who arrives too much late to save the most important elephant of the reservation. Unaware for him, this killing causes that the child Alika and his younger brother Adu be forced to flee from their little town in Mbouma pursued by poachers, after that they were accidental witnesses of the killing. While in Melilla Mateo doubts between saying the truth about what happened or keeping silence to protect Javi, Gonzalo is fired of his job after a discussion with the reservation's guards and he moves to the airport to meet Sandra, his longtime stranded daughter (a lover of alcohol, drugs, party and wild side of life) who still continues resentful with her father after he left she and her mother when Sandra was a child, forced to move with Gonzalo after some troubles in Madrid (center to Spain and country's capital). Hoping to arrive Spain to meet with their father, Alika and Adu take a flight as stowaways hiding them in the undercarriage, but Alika dies by frozen and falls to the sea when the plane opens the undercarriage to take land, leaving alone to Adu who by mistake arrives Mauritania. While Mateo is visited by Tatu's lawyer Paloma trying to convince him to be honest in Javi's trial, Gonzalo tries to save Sandra of her self-destructive spiral of addictions to reconcile each other, and Adu is saved of the police by the teenager Massar who decides to care Adu as his new older brother for traveling Spain by offering sexually himself to truck drivers in order to earn money for finally arriving mount Gurugu, makeshift camp close to Melilla where immigrants await the right moment to pass the border, not knowing that their paths will cross with Mateo and Gonzalo in the most unexpected ways.
