Baztán Valley is more than Amaia Salazar’s birthplace: it is the place she once tried to leave, returned to investigate a murder, and came to recognize as a source of family roots and belonging. The valley’s remembered landscape, postpartum customs, and history of the Agotes give it both intimate meaning for Amaia and cultural significance in the investigation she directs there.

Landscape and Personal Meaning

Amaia’s memories place the valley within a contrast between departure and return. She had wanted to leave the place where she was born, yet nine months before the scene in Pamplona/Iruña she was investigating there, hunting a murderer, and conceived her daughter. In recalling that period, she is carried back to a magical forest and the golden eyes of the lord of its domain. The landscape therefore joins the investigation to the beginning of her pregnancy and to a sense of discovery she associates with Baztán Valley.

That connection becomes a source of steadiness amid upheaval. Returning to Elizondo and digging into her past, together with Víctor’s death, had unsettled Amaia and her family. Her pregnancy offered calm as she faced events that, only months earlier, might have overwhelmed her. As her daughter grew, and as Amaia dared to name her fear and share it with James, she came to feel that she had recovered a sense of home, roots, and land that she had thought lost. Her repeated visits to Elizondo—to eat with her family and sleep at her aunt’s house—make that attachment concrete rather than merely nostalgic.

Custom and Domestic Space

The valley’s history is also conveyed through a postpartum custom recalled by Engrasi. In the past, women were expected to remain at home for a month after giving birth, a period the Church considered necessary to ensure that the baby was healthy and would survive. Only after that interval could the child be baptized, and the mother leave to take the baby to church.

Work and family obligations made the rule difficult to observe literally. Women who needed to go out would have their husbands fetch a roof tile, place it on their heads, and tie it in place with a scarf. The tile allowed them to carry the protection and boundary of home with them while attending to work, other children, or livestock. The custom turns the roof into more than shelter: in the valley’s understanding, the reach of the roof defines the reach of the home. Engrasi’s account gives Amaia’s reluctance to leave her newborn son Ibai a local historical frame, linking a present-day mother’s separation anxiety to an older practice shaped by both religious authority and practical necessity.

History and Investigation

The valley’s past also matters to the inquiry into the church desecrations at Arizkun. Amaia explains that the Agotes lived across Baztán Valley and the Roncal Valley, but were concentrated in a ghetto at Arizkun, in what is now the neighborhood of Bozate. Their history is not treated as a remote local curiosity: Amaia compares its religious, gendered, ancestral, and economic distinctions with forms of discrimination that persist in other settings, while cautioning that younger generations may relate to inherited history differently from their elders.

Amaia decides to travel to Elizondo that same afternoon and remain there for several days to direct the investigation. She assigns Jonan Etxaide to search for groups acting against Catholic interests and to examine material connected with the Agotes and the objects damaged in the desecrations. She also requests separate meetings with the parish priest and the chaplain of Arizkun, because the acts might constitute revenge directed at one of them. Before settling on historical or mystical explanations, she insists that investigators examine the people involved, invoking the unresolved possibility of a personal grievance behind the theft of the Codex Calixtinus. The valley thus functions at once as a lived home, a repository of contested history, and the practical base from which Amaia tests competing explanations.