The impending destruction of a river port town by a hydro-electric project forces its inhabitants to confront the erasure of their history and social identity. As the town faces its final days under the threat of submersion, the narrative captures the shifting dynamics between the working-class bargees and miners and the elite proprietors who once dominated the local hierarchy. Through a series of interconnected vignettes, the story documents the decline of a community from its boom-town prosperity during the Great War to the political turmoil of the Civil War and the eventual forced displacement of its residents. The narrative framework functions as a collective portrait, shifting focus across various social strata to illustrate the slow, inevitable dissolution of a way of life.

This work is regarded as a significant contribution to Catalan literature, noted for its ability to preserve the memory of a vanished landscape through precise, evocative prose. Readers often highlight the author's skill in balancing the intimate details of individual lives with the broader, often tragic, sweep of twentieth-century history. The narrative is frequently praised for its lack of sentimentality, opting instead for a clear-eyed examination of how progress and political upheaval dismantle community bonds. It stands as a testament to the power of fiction to act as a repository for local history that might otherwise be lost to the depths of a reservoir.