One of the founders of the fictional city of Santa Fé. Ana Terra, a strong woman rejected by her family after having a son out of wedlock with a mestizo.Most of the notable characters belong to Terra and Cambará families.

O Tempo e o Vento features a huge cast of characters. In flashbacks and conversations, his days as a revolutionary and as a politician in Rio de Janeiro are remembered, just as the remaining members of the decadent family - particularly his son Floriano, a key part of this metafictional novel - try to rebuild their lives free from the influence of the dying patriarch. Rodrigo Terra Cambará returns to Santa Fé with his fractured family. In O Arquipélago ( The Archipelago), after the fall of the Vargas dictatorship, terminally ill, Dr. Rodrigo arrives to his home town of Santa Fé after studying Medicine, takes his first steps in politics and exhibits many of the personality traits and vices that will follow him for life. O Retrato ( The Portrait) is a portrait in flashback of Rodrigo Terra Cambará, a fictional member of the real government of Getulio Vargas, as a young man.

Between these chapters, the history of the family is told chronologically, since its beginnings. There are seven chapters entitled 'O Sobrado', that tell the story of a siege to the Terra-Cambará mansion, during the Federalist Revolution. The first book, entitled O Continente ( The Continent), progresses in non-linnear chapters. It's also noticeable that the families depicted to the book (ultimately famil y, since at a point they are joined by marriage) also go through transformations, departing from poverty in the beginning of the saga, until the economical and political prosperity, thus, ultimately, the Terra-Cambará family is part of an elite. Throughout the narrative, historical wars, revolutions, political crises and events are depicted and the characters are part or affected by them.

The trilogy tells the story of a traditional family that lives through transformations of the society, so not only the history of that particular family is explored, but also the historical process that took place in that part of Brazil, as in the whole country. The saga is composed of three books, divided in total by seven volumes: Living in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, in southern Brazil, both families experience the transformations of the country. The series tells the story of two families - Terra and Cambará -, and how they evolve through 200 years of history, from 1745 to 1945.

O Tempo e o Vento by Erico Verissimo