Valle de Baztán is more than the setting of Amaia Salazar’s investigation: it is the place where scattered crimes, buried family history, and local burial customs converge. The valley’s darkness and weather give the landscape a palpable presence, while its past helps Amaia recognize that evidence dismissed as inexplicable may belong to a history the official record never preserved.

Setting and Atmosphere

At night, the forest of Baztán appears vast and nearly lightless. Moonlight barely penetrates the clouds; a car’s headlights sweep across curves in the road and into dense vegetation, beyond which the woods seem to open like a cold, deep sea. A vehicle that left the road could disappear from view, and even in daylight a black four-wheel-drive would be difficult to find among the growth. The forest is not simply a backdrop to danger: its scale and cover make concealment feel materially possible.

The drive through this darkness gives the valley a contradictory charge. Amaia is exhilarated by a personal encounter before turning onto the road, yet the forest’s immensity brings a shiver and an awareness of how little can be seen. Passing the Hotel Baztán, she looks toward its dim parking area and remembers an earlier confrontation there: Fermín Montes had held his service weapon first on Flora and then against his own head, while Inspector Iriarte restrained Montes on the ground. The ordinary hotel setting and the remembered crisis occupy the same landscape, making the valley a repository of both private feeling and police violence.

The weather reinforces the sense of a place that acts on the body. In another stretch of the investigation, heavy midday rain eases into a fine, cold drizzle that settles on coats and chills through them. At Engrasi’s house, the smell of soup and warm bread counters the wet cold outside; after feeding Ibai, the family sits beneath the window to eat. The domestic warmth does not remove the investigation from the valley. It places its demands beside the routines of food, childcare, and fatigue.

A Local Origin for a Wider Investigation

Amaia initially describes the case she is pursuing in Baztán as a matter she has taken on largely because of her superiors’ political obligations. But another investigation, she tells Aloisius Dupree, may have its roots in the valley. She suspects that the killer is trying to establish a connection with her, and that the crimes involve more than the individual men who carried them out. Her intuition is not yet a solution: she can identify a troubling pattern, but does not know where to begin.

The emerging pattern links women to the valley even when their murders occurred elsewhere. Amaia says that the women identified so far were from Baztán or had lived there from childhood; Johana Márquez is one example. The killings were committed by men within the victims’ own circles, and the perpetrators had histories of violence against women. The connection between those murders and severed forearms recovered from the cave had gone unnoticed. In at least two cases, the killers disclaimed responsibility for the amputations, and the evidence had not been cross-referenced across police jurisdictions. Confessions followed by suicide, the rapid closure of cases, and the families’ shame all helped keep the pattern obscured.

The valley is therefore a point of origin, not the boundary of the crimes. Amaia’s reconstruction reaches from a killing in Bilbao to the Logroño case and others, while the discovery of bones in the cave makes comparison possible in Johana’s case. The geographic spread complicates the inquiry; the victims’ ties to Baztán give it a route back to a shared landscape.

Burial Customs and Family Ground

The discovery of a child’s arm bone brings the valley’s customs into the investigation. Amaia identifies it as a mairu-beso: the arm of a child who died unbaptized. Such children, she explains, were not officially buried in cemeteries at the time. The expected search for an official grave or cemetery plot is therefore misdirected from the outset.

Amaia understands the alternative only after recognizing a local burial practice. In Baztán, children who died unbaptized could be buried in the itxusuria, the passage of souls: the strip of ground beneath the roof’s dripline, where the eaves mark a boundary between inside and outside. It is a domestic margin rather than a consecrated public burial place. The custom changes the practical geography of the search, turning the family home and its surrounding ground into possible burial sites.

On the way from the police station to Juanitaenea, Amaia reproaches herself for not having thought of this earlier. Her family had always lived in Baztán; other families in the valley had buried children at home, and hers might have done the same. At Juanitaenea, James waits beside Ibai’s pram at the edge of the vegetable garden. The domestic setting, with a sleeping child and a family’s cultivated ground, now carries a second meaning: it may conceal the remains that official burial records could not supply.

History, Belief, and the Valley’s Reputation

The valley’s past gives Amaia another frame for interpreting its present. After hearing Doctor Takchenko describe places that seem to act like mirrors, doors, or amplifiers between worlds, she considers the crimes against girls on the banks of the Baztán River and the recent desecration at Arizkun. She sets these events beside the hardships faced by the valley’s early inhabitants: disease, pests, failed harvests, and a hostile climate. She also recalls the Spanish Inquisition, which prosecuted hundreds of frightened neighbors who confessed in the hope of receiving mercy.

An inquisitor who spent a year among the people of Baztán gathered more than a thousand voluntary confessions of witchcraft and thousands of accusations of harmful practices. Yet he returned to Logroño reporting that he had found no evidence of witches there, and that the valley’s phenomena were of another nature. Amaia treats this history neither as proof of the supernatural nor as a reason to dismiss what she cannot explain. It makes the valley’s reputation part of the case’s intellectual pressure: extraordinary claims have a long history here, but so does the effort to distinguish testimony, fear, and evidence.

Narrative Significance

Valle de Baztán joins several kinds of boundary. The forest separates the road from what it hides; the itxusuria marks the threshold between house and outside; the investigations cross jurisdictions and return to a place shared by the victims. Local knowledge alters the search in concrete ways, revealing why an infant’s remains might be absent from cemeteries and where else to look.

The valley also unsettles the separation between present crimes and inherited history. Its harsh weather and dark woods intensify the physical stakes, while its customs and memories give the investigation a longer temporal reach. For Amaia, Baztán is at once home ground, an investigative lead, and a place that resists easy explanation. The case’s most consequential clues become legible when she stops treating the valley as a mere location and recognizes it as a system of lived traditions, concealed spaces, and connections extending well beyond its borders.