The protagonist is a young woman, Joan Prats suffering from agnosia, a strange, primary visual disease that is one of the neuropsychological disorders of perception. Although her eyes and ears are in perfect condition, her brain is not able to correctly interpret the stimuli it receives. Joan is the only person to know an industrial secret left behind by her late father and becomes the victim of a sinister plan to extract this information. Her captors plan to use her sensory condition to help extract the information that they so desperately want.

Set in Catalonia, Painless weaves two stories: in one, starting during the Spanish Civil War and running through to the ’60s, an asylum attempts to rehabilitate children who feel no pain, by teaching them physical suffering. In the second, in the present time, a brilliant neurosurgeon who needs a bone marrow transplant, discovers this dark past when he searches for his biological parents.

When her not exciting job takes her to Ibiza for business reasons, a woman finds love amidst the partying.