Lisa St. Aubin de Teran was a romantic seventeen-year-old when she married Don Jaime, a South American aristocrat twenty years her senior. Quickly seduced by tales of his ancestral home, she left England for his family's vast sugarcane and avocado plantation, deep in the Venezuelan Andes. There the fantasy life she had imagined met with an almost unbelievable reality - the plantation was in shambles, and her dashing husband turned out to be an international fugitive, suffering from hereditary madness.

The Hacienda tells the sometimes hilarious, sometimes harrowing story of how Lisa courageously restored the plantation, bore her first child, and, perhaps hardest of all, won the respect of la gente.