Desecration of the Juanitaenea Family Burial Ground

The Desecration of the Juanitaenea Family Burial Ground comes to light when disturbed earth around the family home reveals infant remains buried beneath its eaves. The discovery shows that a hidden family cemetery has been systematically searched, and forces Amaia Salazar to confront both a local burial custom and the grief preserved in the ground. What begins as a warning about garden work becomes an investigation into desecration—and a deeply personal reckoning with the dead of her family.

Discovery at Juanitaenea

The discovery begins with preparations for work at Juanitaenea. James gives the architect, Manolo Azpiroz, a key and goes ahead with Ibai, while James remains behind to prepare the child. The architect soon calls to say that beginning work in the garden would be unwise: the ground has already been excavated and disturbed in several places, as if something had been planted. James checks for himself and finds holes containing what appear to be bones. He summons Amaia, who leaves the station with her field kit and brings Iriarte to the house.

The site bears signs of repeated interference rather than one isolated disturbance. In the rain-softened earth, Amaia spots a boot print whose edges are already blurring; Iriarte shields the mound with his umbrella long enough to photograph it. At another opening, the soil seems to have split outward, as if something had pushed up from below. Amaia finds a skull no larger than a small apple. A nearby hole has been hurriedly filled but contains nothing, while dark small bones protrude from mud at the corner where the eaves leave their mark on the ground. Looking around the house, she counts at least nine test holes on one side and as many on the other.

The itxusuria and the family dead

The pattern of the graves makes sense to Amaia through the Baztán custom of the itxusuria, the corridor of souls. Children who died unbaptized were not buried beside cemetery crosses or walls; they were laid beneath the eaves of the family home, in the strip of ground where rainwater dripped from the roof. The line of the eaves marked a boundary between inside and outside, but the dead children remained at home, honored as guardians. Amaia realizes that her own family, like many families in Baztán, had buried its dead children there. The slow drip of rain over more than two centuries had cut a groove in the ground, giving the desecrator a clear line to follow.

As the inspection continues, Amaia and Iriarte find three more skeletons in two holes. The remains are broken and badly deteriorated. In one burial, however, a frayed fiber leads Amaia to the remains of a baby blanket. Beneath waxed cloth, she uncovers the small bones and the lovingly wrapped bundle a mother had placed in the earth. The blanket makes the burial more than an archaeological trace: it preserves the care with which a mother had tucked in her child, even in death. Amaia separates the torn fabric, sees the bones lying unexpectedly intact, and understands that this grave, too, has been looted. She covers the skeleton with the blanket, closes the bundle, and replaces the earth.

The investigation and its limits

Amaia tells Iriarte that the remains belong to her family and asks him not to allow the cemetery to be excavated. She knows that calling Doctor San Martín and his team would mean opening every grave, while the discovery would attract reporters, photographs, and publicity. She also suspects that the person who desecrated the church in Arizkun—not the young man blamed for that act—has been plundering these graves. In her view, public attention might alert the actual desecrator and drive that person away before the investigation can establish more.

Iriarte understands the request because he is also from Baztán. He agrees that he would not allow his own family cemetery to be dug up. Their decision protects the graves from becoming a public spectacle, but it leaves Amaia and her colleagues to assess the disturbance without the full-scale excavation that would expose every burial. The scene therefore carries two demands at once: the need to investigate a possible crime and the duty to respect a family’s dead.

Grief, evidence, and significance

The blanket brings Amaia close to the sorrow of the mothers who buried their children there. Kneeling in the wet ground, she imagines a bereaved woman laying her baby down at night and covering the child against the earth. She wonders whether the mother might have been her great-grandmother or even an earlier ancestor. The thought joins the newly exposed bones to a lineage of private mourning, and the rain falling over the disturbed mounds seems to gather generations of women’s tears into one place.

That inherited grief becomes painfully immediate when Amaia imagines having to lay Ibai in the mud. The thought leaves her pale and short of breath; she regains control and continues, but the discovery has made the family burial ground an intimate threat as well as a crime scene. Its importance rests in this collision of investigative evidence and domestic memory: the same ground that held the family’s dead beneath the sheltering roof has been searched by an intruder who followed the old boundary line.

The suspected desecration also enters a wider inquiry into a repeated criminal signature. In other cases, Amaia has examined postmortem arm amputations and the name Tarttalo scratched into a wall; in the Johana Márquez case, Jasón Medina confessed to murder but could not explain the missing arm, which had disappeared while he was away. The evidence supports Amaia’s suspicion that another person intervened, but it does not establish that the person who took the arm is definitively the same person who looted the Juanitaenea graves. At Juanitaenea, the clearest evidence is the repeated disturbance of the burial ground, the boot print, and the stolen or exposed remains themselves.