The Spanish Daughter

Lorena Hughes’s The Spanish Daughter, published in 2022, centers on Maria Purificación (Puri), the daughter of a Spanish mother and a French father who journeys from Spain to claim her inheritance in Ecuador. Told mainly from Puri’s point of view, the novel traces the historical relationship between Europe and South America through a gripping murder mystery and fight over inheritance. Lorena Hughes, a native of Ecuador, studied fine arts and mass communication at the University of New Mexico, and her perspective living between two cultures is reflected in Puri’s translocation from Spain to Ecuador. The Spanish Daughter was featured in many top book lists in 2021 and was followed by a sequel, The Queen of The Valley, in 2023.

This guide refers to the 2022 paperback edition, published by Kensington Publishing Corporation.

Content Warning: The Spanish Daughter includes depictions of gender-based violence and discussions of miscarriage.

Plot Summary

Don Armand, a cacao plantation owner in Vinces, Ecuador, has died. His will reveals that the plantation will be inherited by his Spanish daughter, Maria Purificación (Puri), who lives and owns a chocolate shop in Sevilla, Spain. Don Armand has three children in Ecuador: Alberto, Angélica, and Catalina, Puri’s half-siblings. Since Alberto has joined the seminary and renounced his inheritance, Puri is set to inherit half of her father’s assets as well, leaving the other half to be split between Angélica and Catalina. The sisters are angry, and Angélica’s French husband, Laurent, says he will take care of it.

After receiving the news, Puri and her bookish husband, Cristóbal, voyage to Ecuador via La Habana, Cuba. Aboard this second ship, a man with a half-burned face tries to strangle Puri. She breaks free, and Cristóbal fights the man on the ship’s deck. Puri hits the man with an oar, but not before he stabs Cristóbal, and the two men fall overboard. In the man’s suitcase, Puri finds a scrap of paper with her name on it and a check from a bank in Vinces, though the beneficiary is blank. Considering the danger she is in, Puri decides to dress in Cristóbal’s clothes and pretend to be him. When she lands in Vinces, Ecuador, she tells Tomás, her father’s lawyer, that she is Cristóbal and that Puri died on the ship of the Spanish flu.

As Puri arrives at La Puri, the plantation her father named for her, she meets her relatives: half-sisters Angélica and Catalina and half-brother Alberto, a priest who has renounced his share of the inheritance. Angélica’s husband, Laurent, a Frenchman European, believes his native France is superior to Ecuador, like many European landowners in the region. Tomás reads the will, which the half-siblings have already heard: Puri gets the majority of the inheritance and control of the plantation. Alberto’s share will be split among the three sisters. With Puri supposedly dead and Cristóbal as her heir, Puri’s share mostly reverts to the estate, except for a 25% share of her original inheritance.

Puri investigates Cristóbal’s murder and the plot against her. Martin, who runs the plantation, shows Puri around the hacienda and she sees her first major clue: a burned-out house where Franco Duarte lived with his mother, a folk healer, and his father, a plantation worker. Franco and his mother Soledad survived the fire but are scarred, and Puri realizes Franco is the man with the burned face who murdered her husband. Later, she takes the check she found to the bank, where the manager tells her that Martin can sign checks from Don Armand’s account. She meets Soledad, who gives her a gold watch she found under Franco’s bed and asks her to help find her son.

As she stays on the plantation, she learns more about her relatives. Angélica acts imperiously, giving commands to Julia, a maid who listens only to her. Catalina, the saint-like woman who allegedly saw a vision of the Virgin Mary, is kind but has her own secrets, like smoking cigarettes. Laurent has affairs with men. Alberto drinks in town and has a lover, Mayra. Puri connects most with Martin, and she drinks with him at a cantina in Vinces; she enjoys learning about male-only spaces but struggles with her attraction to Martin.

In flashbacks, Angélica and her friend Juan grow close, maintaining a flirtation until Angélica marries Laurent. Catalina lies about seeing the Virgin to hide that her friend Elisa, her father’s illegitimate daughter, is in her room. Elisa gives Catalina a doll to show her father, and when she does, Don Armand confesses that Catalina’s mother forced him to abandon both Elisa and her mother. Later flashbacks reveal that Juan goes to college in Colombia and changes his name to Martin.

The secrets that have lain buried in and around the plantation soon rise. Martin discovers Puri’s identity by seeing her bathe in the creek one night. Don Fernando, the owner of the neighboring plantation, has a border dispute with Angélica and confronts the family at La Puri, attacking Martin and then punching Puri. Martin and Puri have sex, but Puri realizes the next day that he and Angélica are having an affair. Tomás takes Puri to Guayaquil, where she finds out that Elisa stole the gold watch that Soledad found. Eventually, Puri realizes that Julia is actually Elisa. Martin also tells her that La Puri originally belonged to Martin’s father, who lost it in a chess game to Don Armand. The story reaches its climax when Cristóbal’s body washes up in Panama. Puri confesses her deceit and accuses Julia of being Elisa, who confesses without thinking that she tried to have Puri murdered to safeguard the inheritance, hoping in time that Angélica would share it with her.

Puri flees to Don Fernando’s plantation, promising him that she will renegotiate the plantation border if he offers her sanctuary. The authorities detain Elisa, and Puri’s half-siblings sue to have the will overturned as Puri heads to Panama to bury Cristóbal. Their lawsuit doesn’t succeed, and Puri takes possession of the plantation. However, she soon learns that like all the cacao trees in the region, hers are infected with a fungus. She gives the plantation back to her siblings, who forge a new relationship with her.

Two years pass, and the family sells the plantation. Puri buys a café and makes chocolate using her grandmother’s invention, a cacao bean roaster, using beans from Martin’s new plantation in Colombia. Mayra works as her assistant, and together with Alberto—her husband—she raises their son, Armandito. Laurent and Angélica leave for Europe, and Puri makes peace with Elisa. She lives with Catalina, and together, they raise her son—he is Martin’s, but everyone assumes he is Cristóbal’s.