Baztán is more than the setting around Amaia Salazar’s investigation: it is a place whose stillness masks unrest, and whose local memory gives the crimes a personal dimension. Elizondo’s cemetery and the Baztán River anchor scenes in which inherited beliefs and the use of Amaia’s ancestors’ remains draw the region directly into the case.

Landscape and Atmosphere

The quiet of Elizondo is presented as deceptive. Walking through the town at night, Amaia senses that its proclaimed peace is not real: beneath the calm, an imagined current of molten lava runs alongside the Baztán River, as if the landscape carried an energy rising from the underworld. The image turns the region’s stillness into a sign of pressure rather than safety.

That contrast is reinforced by the night’s ordinary details. The street falls quiet after patrons enter a bar; the sound of the dam breaks the silence as Amaia reaches the stone bridge at Muniartea. The scene gives Baztán’s quiet a double character: it can feel restful, yet its emptiness also speaks of isolation and an unrest concealed beneath the surface.

Local Memory and Inherited Belief

At Elizondo’s cemetery, a yellowed sheet prompts Amaia to remember a protective formula taught by her grandmother, Juanita, nearly thirty years earlier. The recollection concerns what to do when confronted by a witch: cross the fingers in a particular way and answer with the curse «Sola vayas». Amaia is surprised that the encounter has revived a memory long buried in her mind.

The episode connects the region’s inherited folklore to Amaia’s present experience without establishing the supernatural as fact. The remembered words offer a cultural response to fear, while the cemetery gives that response a setting steeped in death and family history. Amaia’s immediate decision to call the Baztán town hall for the gravedigger and then drive to the cemetery also makes local records and local knowledge part of her investigation.

The Investigation’s Connection to Baztán

Amaia’s inquiries reach beyond the region when she instructs Zabalza to search several hospitals for records of Rosario Iturzaeta Belarrain’s treatment and emergency visits. The request shows how the investigation links Baztán’s family history to institutional records elsewhere; the available evidence does not establish that the hospitals themselves are in Baztán.

Later, as Amaia develops a profile of the inducer behind the desecrations, she proposes a possible personal connection to the region. He may have been born in Baztán, she suggests, or may have had a woman from there whom he killed or wanted to kill. She presents these as hypotheses, not confirmed biography. More firmly, the investigation indicates that the provocations are directed at Amaia and use the remains of her ancestors, making Baztán’s family past part of the antagonist’s challenge to her. The region thus functions as both a landscape of concealed tension and the personal ground on which the case is staged.