Etxebertzeko Borda stands in the remote Orabidea district of Baztán, where scattered farmsteads and difficult roads keep the landscape apart from the valley’s busier routes. The establishment is a practical landmark on the way to Infernuko Errota, but it also becomes an investigative meeting place: in its dining room, Amaia hears a mother make the grave accusation that her children were killed and their bodies taken. The Borda thus joins the region’s material isolation to the investigation’s hidden, deeply personal violence.

Setting and Access

Amaia reaches the area by driving from Elizondo toward Oronoz-Mugaire and turning off toward Orabidea, one of the valley’s least-traveled districts. The surrounding countryside seems to preserve an older rural world: fields and farmhouses remain intact, farmsteads may lie several kilometres apart, and some still lack electricity. The route’s beauty is inseparable from its severity; this is a place where distance, terrain, and sparse infrastructure make travel slow and uncertain.

Etxebertzeko Borda is reached along the road toward Infernuko Errota. From the Borda, the final approach to the mill must be made on foot or on a donkey. The distinction between road and path gives the establishment a particular geographic role: it is a stopping point before the landscape narrows into a more secluded, arduous route.

The Mill and Local History

The Borda’s surroundings are closely associated with Infernuko Errota, a mill built during the Carlist era and remembered for its importance during wartime rationing. Constructed on three trunks spanning the river, with wooden walls, it served people who secretly brought grain there at night on donkeys to have it ground into flour for their families. The mill’s concealed position and the hazardous, damp paths leading to it made the journey dangerous after dark; its name, the Mill of Hell, is linked in the account to that descent through darkness and difficulty.

Amaia had visited the mill the previous spring with James, who had persuaded her to make the trip. That earlier visit gives the route a personal as well as historical dimension: she already knows the area as a place of beauty and unusual power, but now returns to search for a house. The local saying that people in Baztán have always found a way to do what had to be done resonates with the mill’s history of clandestine survival, without making the past’s necessity and the present investigation’s concealed violence the same thing.

A Meeting Place in the Investigation

When Amaia later drives to Etxebertzeko Borda with a distressed woman, the familiar summer terrace is passed over. Amaia used to sit there with James, listening to the river; this time the pair go straight into the dining room. The woman deliberately chooses a table farthest from the bar. A man serves their drinks and returns to the kitchen, where several women can be heard talking, leaving the two visitors to speak apart from the other customers.

Amaia presses the woman to explain why she believes the people she accuses killed her children, whether she has proof, and whether she understands the seriousness and possible consequences of making such a charge. After a brief, blank silence, the woman answers with force. She says she did not witness the killings, but holds her husband responsible for becoming involved in the group’s dark offerings and giving the children to them; she also claims that their bodies were taken and that she was left with an empty grave. She supports her account by showing Amaia a photograph on her phone of two babies, each about three months old and dressed in blue pyjamas. When Amaia asks what the children died of, the woman begins to cry.

Narrative Significance

The Borda’s significance comes from the contrast between its ordinary, inhabited interior and the allegations brought into it. A dining room, a bar, a working kitchen, and a table chosen for privacy provide the setting for an account of ritual offerings, missing bodies, and empty graves. The meeting turns a remote point on a familiar route into a place where private grief enters the investigation as a claim that still requires evidence.

The location also gathers two different kinds of secrecy. The nearby mill was once reached by night to evade rationing and keep families fed; the woman’s account concerns a secret group, children allegedly offered to it, and bodies allegedly removed. The parallel rests in concealment and the difficult terrain, not in an equivalence between those acts. Against the valley’s formidable landscape, the Borda is both a threshold to the secluded countryside and a modest public room in which a hidden accusation is finally spoken aloud.