Elizondo is Amaia’s hometown and the principal setting in which the novel brings together her family life, her return to the Baztán, and the investigation’s material traces of the past. Its cobbled streets and bridges connect intimate domestic spaces to the river, the cemetery, the bakery, and the town’s public buildings. To Amaia, the place can offer the warmth of home, yet the same landscape becomes inseparable from grief and buried family history.

Setting and Townscape

The novel presents Elizondo through a sequence of specific routes rather than as a detached panorama. Amaia enters the town along Santiago Street, descends towards the bridge, crosses Muniartea, and parks outside Engrasi’s house. The cobbles make the journey physically perceptible: wheels rattle over them, and the sound returns in scenes of arrival and passage. In the darkness before dawn, the noise of the Txokoto dam and the river’s humidity reach her before the water itself can be seen, a dark, silk-like shape beyond the car window.

The town’s spaces carry distinct associations. On a rainy walk with Ibai, Amaia passes the porticoed stretch of Jaime Urrutia Street, where open bar doors release warmth and music, and pauses by Arizkunenea Palace to look at old disk-shaped grave markers displayed in its courtyard. Near the town hall, she secretly touches the botil harri, a stone associated with Elizondo’s past and believed to give strength to whoever touches it. Though she disdains superstition, the gesture comforts her. She then looks across the Baztán River from the fountain of the Lamias, where the reflections of the backs of houses make the water seem like a parallel world beneath the surface.

Home, Family, and Everyday Life

Engrasi’s house is one of Amaia’s most important points of return. She lived there from the age of nine until she left Elizondo, and its welcome is conveyed through ordinary domestic details: the television’s constant sound, the fire, and the smells of wood, furniture polish, flowers, biscuits, and butter. On arriving after a long and exhausting journey, Amaia finds the familiar house a source of physical comfort. Even when anger makes her feel estranged from the town, this home remains associated with Engrasi’s care and the sleeping Ibai.

Elizondo also gives the family’s daily routines a public setting. After lunch, Amaia watches Ros leave for the bakery and remains on the bridge until her sister is out of sight, troubled by Ros’s evasive manner and the smile that keeps fading. Later, she takes Ibai through the rain in his pram. Moving at an unfamiliar, unhurried pace, she checks his cheek with the back of her hand, tucks him in, and watches him fall asleep over the uneven cobbles. She stops at a restaurant James particularly liked, where the owner recognizes her and she reserves a table for two. The walk’s small acts of care make the town a setting for Amaia’s attachment to her son, not only for the investigation and its dangers.

Investigation, Memory, and the Cemetery

The town’s familiar landmarks also intersect with Amaia’s police work and private history. At the back of the bakery in Txokoto, she finds the words PUTA TRAIDORA sprayed in thick strokes on the wall. She studies the insult in silence and does not tell Ros about it when they meet at home. The discovery places a threat within an everyday family workplace; the bakery is both a site of routine labor and a place exposed to hostility.

Elizondo Cemetery draws the present investigation into older losses. Amaia visits its gravedigger’s cramped office, a concrete cubicle crowded with tools, locked metal filing cabinets, and a small radio, to consult burial records. After leaving, she carries a folded sheet in her coat pocket and goes to Juanita’s grave. The nearby graves place several generations of family memory within the same grounds: her grandfather’s is beside Juanita’s, while her father’s lies behind them. At the grave, Amaia recalls learning of her father’s death and the cold silence that had separated them; she had somehow known of his death just before the telephone rang. The remembered estrangement returns as a question of what he had allowed, giving the cemetery’s records and graves a personal weight beyond their investigative purpose.

The cemetery also holds the grave of Ainhoa Elizasu, whose murder brought Amaia back to the Baztán to investigate the worst case of her life. Amaia finds flowers and a rag doll left there, then examines the old family mausoleum, whose heavy slab remains intact. Later, she sees Flora standing motionless at the grave of Anne Arbizu. These are distinct points in a landscape where the investigation repeatedly meets mourning: graves offer evidence of burial and inheritance, but they also preserve relationships and losses that no record can make simple.

Return and Significance

Elizondo’s meaning shifts with Amaia’s state of mind. In one return, the house receives her with warmth; in another, after she has learned that infant bones found near the family home share her DNA, rain, river, cobbles, and the town’s accumulated pain provoke anger. She enters without noticing the welcome she usually feels. The setting has not changed, but what it contains for her has: the familiar landscape now holds a newly exposed absence in her own history.

The town’s recurring water imagery sharpens that tension. The river can appear still and reflective, suggesting a hidden world beneath its surface, while the dam’s noise and the damp air announce water in darkness. Elizondo is at once an inhabited place of restaurants, work, family homes, and remembered walks, and a landscape in which graves, old objects, and bodily traces bring the past into the present. Its significance lies in this overlap: Amaia’s return is not simply a return to home, but a renewed encounter with what the town has kept and what her family has left unexplained.