El Salvador, 1917: Lawyer Juan Alonso Hernandez arrives in San Salvador to discover that coffee is the new gold. While fighting against the exploitation of coffee plantation workers he gets ousted to a small rural town that is on the brink of social unrest. There, he meets Isabel Castaneda, a cheerful and beautiful woman who is left to raise their son alone when Juan is imprisoned as a political prisoner. Alone and in desperate circumstances, Isabel turns to Juan's younger brother, Marco, a soldier who is an accomplice in the largest massacre in El Salvador's history. When Isabel has a second son with him, it sets off a dramatic saga that stretches over a hundred years, following four generations of the Castaneda family as their beloved El Salvador is forever changed by political corruption, dictatorships, civil war, and mass exodus. Will the family rise above the violent conflict in the country, or be torn apart and destroyed by it? Inspired in part by real figures, events, and personal experiences, A Century of Promises tells the story of how today's El Salvador came to be through the eyes of the Castaneda family.