Bozate, now a neighborhood of Arizkun, is presented as the principal place of settlement for the Agotes in the Baztán region. Its significance extends beyond geography: centuries of restrictions made the neighborhood a physical marker of exclusion, while the memory of that treatment remains contested and painful for the surrounding community.

Setting and Settlement

The Agotes lived across the Valle de Baztán and Roncal, but were concentrated in Arizkun in a segregated quarter that is now Bozate. The history of their arrival is uncertain. Accounts discussed in the novel propose that they came through the Pyrenees while fleeing medieval warfare, famine, plague, or religious persecution. One theory identifies them as Cathars; others suggest deserters who contracted leprosy in French lazarets, or a mixture of outcasts brought to serve the local feudal lord, Pedro de Ursua. The last possibility is offered as a potential explanation for why so many settled in Bozate, not as an established origin.

A Neighborhood Made by Exclusion

For centuries, the Agotes were treated as inferior and barred from living outside Bozate, running businesses, or marrying people who were not Agotes. They worked chiefly in woodcraft and leatherworking, occupations regarded as unclean. Their difference was made publicly legible: they had to sew an identifying mark onto their clothes and, in some accounts, ring a bell to announce themselves, as if they were lepers.

Separation in the Church

The exclusion continued inside Catholic religious life, despite the Agotes being Christians who observed its rites. They had a separate baptismal font, and the holy water used for them was discarded. In the church at Arizkun, they were kept apart from other worshippers by a railing, restricted from approaching the altar, and in many cases made to remain at the back of the nave and enter through a smaller, separate door. The railing was later removed as a rejection of the deep shame this history still causes among Arizkun’s residents.

Silence and Reclaimed Roots

When Amaia asks about the Agotes, Iriarte describes the subject as sensitive: until recently, an outsider asking about them in Arizkun could meet an impenetrable silence. Zabalza recounts stories of a writer, and of Camilo José Cela, receiving denials or evasive answers when they tried to investigate the group. The neighborhood’s history is therefore marked not only by imposed separation but also by reluctance to speak about it.

Amaia observes that younger residents are more inclined to take pride in their roots without carrying the same burden as their elders. In the investigation, the history of Bozate’s segregation is raised as a possible historical explanation for the present-day desecrations at the church in Arizkun. The connection makes the neighborhood more than a setting: it is where an inherited injustice, the community’s silence, and the contemporary difficulty of confronting the past meet.