The Captain of Ponche Verde

Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, 1835. When the Ragamuffin War erupts across the plains of southern Brazil, Bento Fagundes, a young ranch hand known for his courage, watches his life change forever.

The son of a poor widow, he works the powerful Santa Vitória Ranch, owned by Colonel Anselmo de Albuquerque, one of the province’s largest producers of dried beef.

There, Bento guards a secret that could cost him everything: his love for Isabel Albuquerque, the colonel’s only daughter.

Raised beneath the same pampa sky, the two learned early that they belonged to different worlds.

When the war begins, Anselmo sends hundreds of men from his ranches to fight alongside the Ragamuffin rebels — Bento among them.

Through the ten years of the Ragamuffin War, their love survives through secret letters that cross battlefields and vast distances — until the colonel discovers the correspondence and sends Isabel away to a distant convent in Rio de Janeiro.

When the war finally ends in 1845, after the Treaty of Ponche Verde, Bento returns home a hero — decorated for bravery and promoted to captain.

At Santa Vitória he finds a different man than the one he left behind: a father transformed by years of war and by his daughter’s absence, finally willing to set his pride aside.

With the convent’s address in hand, Bento sets out on one last journey — from the gaúcho pampas all the way to the Imperial Court in Rio de Janeiro — to find the woman who waited an entire decade for him.

The Captain of Ponche Verde is the story of a love that survived ten years of war, letters delayed by distance, and the silence forced upon it by a proud father — and of the courage it takes, after everything, to forgive