The patriarch of the Benavides family has just been led to his final resting place. After many years, relatives and neighbors are once again stepping foot in Bernarda's house, the home where the tragedy will unfold.

Bernarda, his wife and mother of five daughters, openly scorns everyone who comes to offer their condolences, proudly and boldly declaring that after the death of her father, she now stands alone in this life, with her five daughters filled with fear and hatred towards her, despised by all. Yet she is satisfied. Her will now prevails, and her command is law. No one will dare to overthrow this regime.

She has ensured that everyone lives in this house with self-denial and fear, under the weight and pressure of her dusty traditional beliefs about morality. Only Augusta, Bernarda's daughter from her first marriage, is allowed to speak with a man at night, her fiancé Pepe el Romano, while the others are locked inside the house and must work to prepare their dowries, with the prospect of their own marriages.

However, the mother cannot lock away or imprison the thoughts and desires of the other girls. The last work of Spanish author and poet Federico García Lorca—focused on issues of oppression and compromise—was written in 1936, foreshadowing Franco's fascist regime in Spain.