La Rinconada sits at 5,300 meters in the Peruvian Andes, the highest city in the world, built around a gold deposit that draws roughly 10,000 miners into shafts where the air is thin and the work is lethal. The film follows Arnaldo, one of those miners, whose wages barely cover basic needs, and Major Aranda, who leads a small police unit trying to contain illegal explosives trading and lawlessness in the settlement. Away from the mines, the same highlands support the vicuña, a wild relative of the llama whose wool ranks among the most expensive in the world. Communities gather once a year for the Chakku, a traditional roundup and shearing ritual that has survived largely unchanged, and the film shows the choreography of villagers herding the animals across open ground. Interviews and on-location footage move between these two economies, gold and wool, and the people bound to each, tracking how altitude, cold, and thin oxygen shape daily routines that outsiders would find close to unlivable.