SUMMARY

Teresa Suárez, better known as La Gaviota, is a coffee field laborer who, together with her mother, goes to the harvest in the ranch ‘Casablanca’ every year. This year is different because the landlord, D. Octavio Vallejo, died. Her mother, who had a great friendship with him, is shattered.

The ‘patriarch of the coffee’, as he was widely known, has his funeral, and it is attended by his two sons and all his grandchildren. Among them, there was Sebastián Vallejo, who had been raised in Europe and currently lives and studies with his sister Paula and his cousin Iván in London.

Sebastián is an attractive guy, who has it all but had never been able to be with a woman. Things change when he meets Gaviota – both fall crazily in love with each other and without thinking about it, they gave themselves over to a night in the coffee plantation.

Sebastián doesn’t want to go back to London after meeting Gaviota, but she urges him to go back and to meet her again on October 17, a year later; and if the love they feel then is real they will get married the following day.

But things don’t come off as they planned. Gaviota gets pregnant and, deceived by a white slavery gang, goes to Europe with the hope to find Sebastián. On the other hand, Sebastian goes through a very difficult moment in his life since his parents just died in a road accident so he must return to Colombia. When he arrives, the townspeople tell him that Gaviota went to Europe as a prostitute. Sebastián is shocked; so feeling disappointed and not to stay alone, he decides to marry with Lucia, a friend of Iván and his wife.

Gaviota, who loses the baby in her odyssey, when she discovers she had been tricked and realizes she cannot find Sebastián, she decides to give herself up to be deported and sent back to Colombia to get to her date with Sebastián. But Gaviota arrives a day later and finds out that he got married.
From this moment on, the encounters and disencounters between the couple are a constant struggle until they can live their love story.

OUR COMMENT

This is possibly the best original love story from the ‘90s. It’s a simple and unpretentious love story but very well realized and with a very good script. It has the extra element of being set in the world of coffee, which gives a great richness to the story.

Sebastián and Gaviota, interpreted by Guy Ecker and Margarita Rosa de Francisco, are a couple with a lot of chemistry - they make you believe in them and you suffer with them.
Another element which is well-done is the quarrels. In their dialogs they talk, argue and quarrel, that is, they say things to each other. In today’s telenovelas we don’t see those types of dialogs, in which the protagonists have scenes and long phrases to express sensible things.

One of the best quarrels is when they’re arguing and they both approach a policeman to ask him to put them in prison so that each can stay away from the other. Finally, everything ends up in a nice reconciliation.

Gaviota is one of the best heroines in the world of telenovelas. Even if at the beginning she’s an almost illiterate girl who argues with everybody, then she turns into a great executive, though she never loses her naivety and freshness, and that’s what makes everybody who meets her to fall in love. Gaviota studies, makes the effort, learns and exceeds herself, up to the point in which she turns into a self-governing woman, capable of providing for herself and well-known in the coffee industry for her own merits. She wins people’s respect without having to be the appendage of a man.

Another brilliant role is that of the third party, doctor Mauricio Salinas. This time we also find a different type of character – he loves Gaviota in secret and doesn’t make up plans to conquer her but, as Sebastian appreciates one day, he patiently waits. And he does it very good indeed.

I’d also highlight the role of Mrs. Carmenza, Gaviota’s mother. It’s a very nice character because she’s a humble and simple woman who wants the best for her daughter; she wants that the Cinderella tale may come true for Gaviota.

As we already saw in other Colombian telenovelas, the story develops in a simple and credible way. The characters are neither super good nor super mean; they all have their dreams and fight for their own interests. The villains of the story, Iván Vallejo and his wife, Lucrecia, are seen as two ambitious poor devils that couldn’t enjoy themselves, as they were continuously envying other people’s lives.

THE BEST

Everything. Although it’s a telenovela from ten years ago, and the staging might look old, it bears the passing of the years pretty well. The details are taken care of, as well as the objects, which are important for the story. There are some objects for which we would pay to have, like the watch Sebastian gives to Gaviota, the packet of Casablanca coffee with the mark of Gaviota’s kiss or the coffee pendant that Sebastian, as well as Mauricio, gives to Gaviota for her birthday.

Another thing to be stressed is the phrases which already made history, like when Sebastián says: “In this world, there are only two things I know how to do – to plant coffee and to love Gaviota”.

THE WORST

Maybe the characters spend little time together - there are blank spaces in the telenovela, since they can’t see each other because Gaviota disappears many times.

As a contrast to Gaviota’s eagerness for excellence and obstinacy for success, Sebastián is a quite ‘soft’ hero – he easily sinks and it seems he can’t solve his problems by himself. He’s easily manipulable and his family deceives him as easy as a child.
To finish off, he’s constantly drinking. His love for Gaviota is almost obsessive, which is justified because she’s the only one with whom his ‘problem’ doesn’t appear, but it’s desirable that he should be more assertive and determined.