Taconera Park is a brief refuge in Pamplona where Amaia Salazar steps out of the city’s traffic and into a moment shaped by bodily change, memory, and a renewed sense of home. Its rain-washed paths give her room to absorb the aftermath of the courthouse and, when a contraction interrupts her walk, the approaching birth of her daughter; its green landscape also recalls the Baztán Valley, where her life took a decisive turn nine months earlier.

Setting and Approach

After leaving the courthouse, Amaia avoids going straight home. Her in-laws, including Clarice, have been staying there for two weeks, and the altered feel of home makes the prospect of facing questions unattractive. She considers taking a taxi, but notices the park’s trees at the end of San Roque and sets out on foot, estimating the distance to her house at a kilometer and a half.

Inside Taconera Park, the traffic noise falls behind her. The air and ground feel changed by the rain: the fresh smell of wet grass replaces car exhaust, and she slows along the stone paths cut through the park’s green. The contrast makes the park more than a shortcut. It becomes a pause between the courthouse and home, where Amaia can walk without immediately having to explain or respond to anyone.

A Walk Interrupted

As she walks, Amaia thinks about Jasón Medina, whom she remembers from interrogations nine months earlier. He had confessed to raping and murdering his wife’s daughter, Johana Márquez, and she considers his suicide in prison consistent with his fear of entering the general prison population after conviction. The case had intersected with her investigation of the Basajaun murders because Medina had tried, clumsily, to imitate the serial killer’s method after reading about it in the press. Teniente Padua of Guardia Civil had invited her to take part in the inquiry. Amaia connects that earlier investigation with the present through the nine months that have passed, during which she became pregnant.

A strong contraction stops her. Bent forward and leaning on her umbrella, she endures a sharp pain low in her abdomen that reaches the inside of her thighs and causes a cramp. The wave passes quickly. She had wondered whether she would recognize the beginning of labor; now, with her due date still a week away, she addresses her daughter tenderly and wonders whether the child is ready to arrive. The park’s quiet is briefly occupied by this intimate, physical threshold: the birth she had imagined becomes an immediate possibility.

Landscape, Memory, and Home

When the pain disappears, Amaia feels joy alongside nervousness at the prospect of her daughter’s arrival. The park is deserted, damp, and cool; under the bright light breaking through the clouds over Pamplona, its emerald green seems unusually radiant. That vivid landscape brings back the sensation of discovery she associates with the Baztán Valley, and her walk turns in memory toward the forest and the golden eyes of its lord. Nine months earlier she had been investigating in the place where she was born, the place she had always wanted to leave and had returned to in order to hunt a murderer; it was also where she conceived her daughter.

The park’s evocation of the valley links Amaia’s pregnancy with a wider change in her sense of belonging. Her daughter’s presence has brought a calm she had long imagined but needed amid the upheavals of returning to Elizondo, confronting her past, and coping with Víctor’s death. In the family’s changed circumstances, Engrasi remains a steady presence, while Flora has moved to Zarautz and Ros has taken charge of Mantecadas Salazar, proving herself a capable manager despite initial uncertainty. Amaia has offered help and spent many recent weekends in Elizondo, but recognizes that Ros no longer needs her support. Her continued visits—to eat with her sisters and sleep at her aunt’s house—are no longer simply an obligation to help. The landscape and the walk give form to a sense of roots and home that Amaia had thought lost.