Rosa's fiancé, a poor miner named Esteban Trueba, is devastated and attempts to mend his broken heart by devoting his life to restoring his family hacienda, Las Tres Marías, which has fallen into poverty and disrepair.

Through a combination of intimidation and reward, he enforces respect and labor from the fearful peasants and turns Tres Marías into a "model hacienda".

He turns the first peasant who spoke to him upon arrival, Pedro Segundo, into his foreman, who quickly becomes the closest thing that Trueba ever has to an actual friend during his life.

During the period of their engagement, Esteban builds what everyone calls "the big house on the corner," a large mansion in the city where the Trueba family will live for generations.

Although she misses her sister-in-law, Clara is unable to find her by any means - the gap between her and her husband widens as she devotes more time to her daughter and the mystic arts.

Upon arriving at Tres Marías for the first time, Blanca immediately befriends a young boy named Pedro Tercero, who is the son of her father's foreman.

After an earthquake that destroys part of the hacienda and leaves Esteban injured, the Truebas move permanently to Las Tres Marías.

Pedro Tercero meets with Blanca in secret adopting disguises while also spreading his ideas in the form of song to neighboring haciendas.

A visiting French count to the hacienda, Jean de Satigny, reveals Blanca's nightly romps with Pedro Tercero to her father.

Clara decides to never speak to him again, reclaims her maiden name and moves out of Tres Marías and back to the city, taking Blanca with her.

Esteban, furious and lonely, blames Pedro Tercero for the whole matter; putting a price on the boy's head with the corrupt local police.

Esteban, desperate to save the family honor, gets Blanca to marry the French count by telling her that he has killed Pedro Tercero.

In pure hatred of her privileged life and eventual inheritance, García tortures Alba repeatedly, looking for information on Miguel.

Alba resolves that she will not seek vengeance on those who have injured her, choosing to believe in the hope that one day the human cycle of hate and revenge will be broken.

She is the youngest daughter of Severo and Nívea del Valle, wife of Esteban Trueba, and mother of Blanca, Jaime, and Nicolás.

Her uncle eventually leaves in a primitive airplane he built himself, disappearing for many months, assumed dead but later is found to die instead as the result of a 'mysterious African plague' contracted during his travels.

Clara practices divining and moving inanimate objects, most notably a three-legged table, and she is surrounded by friends such as the psychic Mora sisters and The Poet.

In his youth, he seeks the mermaid-like and green-haired Rosa the Beautiful, daughter of Severo and Nívea del Valle, toiling in the mines to earn a suitable fortune so that he can support her.

Although he eventually marries Clara (Rosa's sister and youngest daughter of the Del Valles) and raises a large family, Esteban's stubborn and violent ways alienate all those around him.

As a self-made man who earned all of his wealth from years of work spent improving Tres Marías, Esteban scorns communists and believes them to be lazy and stupid.

She spends her childhood between the Truebas' house in the capital and Tres Marías, where she forms an intense connection with a boy named Pedro Tercero García, the son of Esteban's foreman.

After Blanca leaves the Count and returns to the Trueba home, she sees Pedro sporadically, resisting his attempts to persuade her to marry, but their relationship continues.

Blanca is also able to earn large amounts of money for the first time by selling her clay figurines, which are seen as folk art by Canadians.

It is mentioned that he resumes his political crusade during his exile in Canada where his music is embraced in translation even if "chickens and foxes are underdeveloped creatures" in comparison with the "eagles and wolves" of the North.

Alba (Spanish for "Dawn," Latin for "white") is the daughter of Blanca and Pedro Tercero García, although for many years of her life she was led to believe that Count de Satigny was her father.

The last paragraph reveals that she is pregnant, although she does not know (or care) whether the child is Miguel's or the product of the rapes that she endured at the hands of security police, during her imprisonment.

A shy, bookish, and compassionate doctor who treats the poor, he serves as a contrast to his outgoing twin brother Nicolas and his bad-tempered father.

For instance, in Virginia, a parent initially brought attention to the novel’s explicit content in 1997 by passing out “packets of excerpts from The House of Spirits with the heading “Would you allow your 16-year-old daughter to read this material?

Similarly, in Maryland, the novel was brought to the attention of the school board in Montgomery County for its explicit content, specifically the depiction of necrophilia—“in which a young medical student kisses a female corpse,” referring to the molestation of the body of Rosa the Beautiful.

Unlike the film and the previous adaptation, this version was written and performed in Spanish and has been staged in Latin American countries such as Chile and Costa Rica.