SU(3) Chiral approach to meson and baryon dynamics

We report on recent progress on the chiral unitary approach, which is shown to have a much larger convergence radius than ordinary chiral perturbation theory, allowing one to reproduce data for meson meson interaction up to 1.2 GeV and meson baryon interaction up to the first baryonic resonances. Applications to physical processes so far unsuited for a standard chiral perturbative approach are presented, concretely the K^- p\to\Lambda(1405)\gamma reaction and the N^\ast (1535)N^\ast(1535)\pi and \eta couplings.