Elizondo, Amaia's hometown

Elizondo, Amaia's hometown is the place where Amaia Salazar’s personal history and police work converge. She returns to the town where she was born to investigate, and the return gradually changes its meaning: from a past she had wanted to escape into a source of family connection, belonging, and clues to a secret about her own birth.

Setting and Return

Amaia’s connection to Elizondo is bound up with departure and return. She had always wanted to leave the place where she was born, yet comes back to hunt a murderer; during that return, she also conceives her daughter. Looking back on this period, she associates Baztán with discovery, a feeling that unexpectedly follows her into Pamplona. Elizondo is therefore more than a point of origin: it is the setting of a return that brings together her work, her past, and the family life she is beginning to reclaim.

After the death of Víctor and the upheaval caused by her return, Amaia’s family is changed. Engrasi remains a steady presence, continuing her card readings and afternoon poker games. Flora moves to Zarautz, ostensibly to film daily baking programs for national television, and hands control of Mantecadas Salazar to Ros. Ros proves to be a capable manager, though initially overwhelmed. Amaia offers help and spends many weekends in Elizondo, but comes to recognize that her sister no longer needs her support to run the business. She keeps visiting anyway: to share meals, sleep at Engrasi’s house, and be at home.

Family Ground and Belonging

The town’s importance is expressed through ordinary acts of return rather than a single declaration. Amaia’s visits to Engrasi and Ros make room for a family life that had been unsettled by the events of the preceding months. As her daughter grows inside her, and after Amaia dares to name her fear and share it with James, she feels that she has recovered a sense of home, roots, and land that she had believed lost for years. The attachment does not erase the violence and grief associated with her return; instead, it gives her a form of steadiness with which to face them.

Her pregnancy also alters how she experiences her past. The certainty of the child within her brings a calm she had long imagined and helps her endure events that, only months earlier, might have overwhelmed her. In that sense, Elizondo becomes associated not only with old wounds but with a newly felt continuity between generations: Amaia’s own origins, her daughter’s impending arrival, and the relatives who remain part of her life.

Investigation and the Family Record

Elizondo is also the base from which Amaia directs an investigation into desecrations at the church in nearby Arizkun. She announces that she will go to Elizondo for several days to lead the inquiry. Jonan is assigned to look into groups acting against Catholic interests, the history of the Agotes, and the damaged objects; Amaia also requests separate meetings with the parish priest and the chaplain, since either might have been the target of a personal vendetta. She cautions the team against leaping to historical or mystical theories before investigating the people involved. Her approach places local history alongside ordinary police work rather than allowing either to substitute for the other.

The family’s history becomes part of another investigation when Amaia learns that Rosario had a third, twin birth in 1980. The recorded deliveries list Flora in 1973 and Rosaura in 1975, both natural and uncomplicated, and then a natural twin birth in 1980 with two apparently healthy girls whose names are not entered. The missing names make the record’s silence consequential: the file establishes that Amaia had another sister, but does not explain what became of both babies.

Amaia asks whether a newborn’s death would have been recorded. She is told that a death in the valley would normally have a certificate, while deaths in a Pamplona hospital fell outside that local record-keeping arrangement. A certificate is then found for a newborn daughter of Juan Salazar and Rosario Iturzaeta, with the cause given as “crib death,” the common term for sudden infant death syndrome. The explanation suggests that the baby may have been unwell, but it does not resolve the contradictions surrounding her birth and death.

A Place Marked by What Is Missing

The family’s recollections deepen the uncertainty. Ignacio believes relations with Rosario changed after the baby died, indicating that the death affected the family even though Amaia and her sisters had not been told about the child’s birth. Her aunt and uncle remember a closed coffin and say they did not insist on seeing the newborn’s body. They witnessed a burial, Amaia observes, but that does not establish whose body was in the coffin.

Amaia identifies the unresolved elements together: her mother concealed the birth from the family; neither Amaia nor her sisters knew about the baby; the birth certificate contains irregularities; and human remains discovered in strange circumstances may belong to the missing sister. The evidence raises suspicion about the circumstances of both birth and death without, at this point, proving every detail. Elizondo thus holds two kinds of record at once: the lived geography of family visits and homecoming, and the incomplete documentary and oral traces through which Amaia tries to recover a sister her family’s history had left unnamed.