  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.
