Caserío Argi Beltz is a property in Baztán whose history becomes a crucial lead in an investigation into infant deaths and secret ritual groups. The evidence connects the caserío to a group that practiced animal sacrifice, to the unexplained death of a girl born there, and to meetings attended by people associated with Doctor Berasategui. The site matters not because every allegation about it is conclusively established, but because separate testimony, missing records, and a wider pattern of deaths make it impossible to treat its history as an isolated local rumor.

Setting and reported history

A witness told Amaia Salazar that a sect had established itself at Caserío Argi Beltz in the 1970s, in Baztán, and practiced rites described as close to Satanism, including animal sacrifices. A reliable but unnamed informant corroborated the account of similar practices at another caserío in Lesaka and suggested that one leader moved between the two groups. This makes Argi Beltz part of a wider network rather than simply the setting for a single suspect gathering, although the available testimony does not establish the full organization or its membership.

The group’s reported beliefs gave sacrifice a place in an exchange with supernatural forces. In a separate account of a Lesaka group, a former member described a charismatic leader, Xabier Tabese, as teaching an old religion founded on offerings to the powers of the land. He presented ancient monuments and ley lines as markers of those powers and promised that offerings could bring the group what it wanted. The account identifies Tabese as a figure who crossed between the Lesaka and Argi Beltz groups; it does not establish that he lived at the caserío. Members’ supernatural explanations remain their beliefs, not independently verified facts.

The girl born at the caserío

The informant said that a girl was born at Argi Beltz and died in strange circumstances. Another witness supported the claim that the child had been born there. Her parents, who owned the property, maintained that she had suffered a stroke while the family was abroad. Yet the investigation found no death certificate, autopsy report, or burial record, and Jonan Etxaide had established that she probably never went to the United Kingdom and had not left Spain. Those absences do not by themselves prove how or where she died, but they undermine the account that she died overseas and leave the child’s fate unresolved.

The parents were described as a wealthy couple and the current owners of the caserío. Their home later hosted meetings associated with Doctor Berasategui, which they initially explained as sessions to help families in grief. Nurse Hidalgo, Yolanda Berrueta’s former husband, and Valentín Esparza were among those who sometimes attended. Amaia’s informant said the meetings had a different nature from the one the hosts claimed. The overlap between the property’s earlier ritual history and these later meetings raises questions about continuity and association, but the evidence does not make every attendee a proven participant in a crime.

Ritual rules and the limits of the testimony

The investigation’s informant described a ritual system in which a child had to be a girl, younger than two, and unbaptized. The group’s rationale was that a child’s soul remained in transition before the second birthday and could serve as a vehicle for communication with spiritual worlds. Baptism, in this account, constituted an offering and commitment to another god, making an unbaptized child necessary for the group’s rite. These claims explain the group’s stated rules; they do not validate its supernatural premises.

The same account associated sacrifice with suffocation, invoking Inguma, and with the subsequent surrender of the child’s body. A former member’s account of a different group described a child’s parents as having carried out the offering and said that the group dispersed soon afterward. The investigation treated such testimony as a reason to examine the unexplained death at Argi Beltz, not as conclusive proof that the girl born there was sacrificed. Keeping that distinction matters: the case draws force from the gap between a coherent ritual explanation and the missing documentary evidence needed to establish what actually happened.

From property to investigative map

Caserío Argi Beltz also entered the investigation through its geography. When Amaia Salazar expanded the map of infant deaths, she asked that older cases be marked in a different color, including the girl associated with Argi Beltz, her own sister, a girl from Lesaka, and children from Elbete and Erratzu. The resulting sequence followed the river from its source toward its mouth, where it takes the name Bidasoa. The map turned scattered family histories into a visible pattern along the river corridor, while leaving the significance of that pattern open to investigation.

The caserío thus became one marked point among several, not a self-sufficient explanation for the entire series. The places, deaths, and accounts had to be compared with one another; proximity along a river could suggest a pattern without proving a shared cause. Its importance lay in bringing an alleged ritual site, a child whose death lacked the records expected by the family’s account, and a wider geography of infant deaths into the same inquiry.

Narrative significance

Argi Beltz concentrates the investigation’s tension between what can be documented and what witnesses say they believe. The property is linked to the sect through testimony; the girl’s birth is supported by a witness; and the official story of an overseas death is weakened by the absence of travel and death records. Around those facts gather claims of offerings, spiritual forces, and a leader who moved between groups. The location therefore functions as both a place under scrutiny and a test of evidentiary restraint: it helps Amaia connect people and cases without turning suspicion into certainty.