Ainhoa is a French Basque village on the route between Dantxarinea and the Baztán region, at once a place of passage shaped by pilgrimage and the setting of a family tragedy that unsettles the boundary between grief and investigation. Its colorful street and churchyard, where graves are visible among the ordinary life of the town, give the search for two children’s bodies a distinctly public setting: what a mother senses as absence, the village’s priest and neighbors insist they witnessed as burial.

Setting and Historical Character

Ainhoa is described as the first French settlement after crossing the border at Dantxarinea. It lies in Aquitaine, in the French Basque territory of Labourd, and was built in the thirteenth century on a border route of the Camino de Santiago connected with Baztán. Like Elizondo, it was conceived as a place to receive and accommodate the many pilgrims passing through. Its history as a waypoint is visible in the village’s architecture and in the unusual arrangement of its burial ground.

Amaia Salazar regards Ainhoa as the most beautiful village in the south of France. She and her colleagues arrive on foot after parking beside the fronton, or traditional pelota court, and walk along a broad avenue lined with handsome houses. Their appearance recalls the houses of Txokoto in Elizondo, but the familiar brown beams of Baztán have been painted here in vivid greens, reds, blues, and yellows. Stone coats of arms and plaques display Basque names altered into conspicuously French forms, making the village’s border identity legible in the details of its façades.

The Tremond family home stands toward the end of the street, where the avenue bends gently toward a steeper stretch lined with more fine houses. From the open doorway, Amaia and her companions glimpse a courtyard paved with rounded stones set into the surface, forming a precise circle. It had once served as a carriage courtyard. The house is therefore encountered not through an interior visit but through a passing look at a visible fragment of family history, as the investigators make their initial visit in the guise of tourists.

Churchyard and the Presence of the Dead

The feature that most defines Ainhoa for Amaia is its cemetery around the church. The church was dedicated to Our Lady of the Assumption by Juan Pérez de Baztán, lord of Jaureguizar and Ainhoa, though successive alterations have made its architectural style difficult to determine. The traditional fronton and the brightly painted avenue of old houses give the village a historic appearance; the churchyard makes that past part of its everyday geography.

Burials around the church began around the sixteenth century, as the population became more settled and pilgrims died while passing through. The cemetery developed as a series of galleries in which each household had its own grave marker beside its neighbors’. The plots are so tightly packed that reaching some graves means stepping over others. Numerous round steles bear geometric designs, Basque crosses, solar figures, and images of the dead people’s occupations; the most elaborate tell the course of a life from birth to death.

The burial ground completely encircles the church on a small rise in the middle of the village. Its tombs and crosses can be seen from the streets, shops, and cafés. Unlike a cemetery enclosed by a wall that marks a separation between living and dead, this one is open to view and woven into the town’s ordinary surroundings. That arrangement is described as gentle and familiar to residents but striking to an outsider. In the investigation, it also means that the children’s grave can be seen from nearby, turning private mourning into something neighbors witness and discuss.

The Berrueta Children’s Grave

During Amaia’s inquiries, a shopkeeper confirms that Yolanda Berrueta has repeatedly tried to open her children’s grave. He says he once alerted the gendarmes after seeing her attempt it with a crowbar. Though he presents the report as a distressing duty, Amaia reassures him that he acted as a good neighbor and that the family would be grateful. The exchange shows how the cemetery’s openness allows grief to become a public matter: the grave is not hidden from the village, and Yolanda’s attempts cannot pass unnoticed.

The priest gives the family’s distress a different emphasis. He says Yolanda comes every week, trying to persuade him that the children are not in the tomb and that someone took their bodies. He respects maternal instinct and understands the magnitude of a mother’s grief, but refuses to encourage her belief. He states that the children died, that they are buried in the cemetery, and that he officiated at the funeral and saw their coffins lowered into the grave. His account establishes what the village’s religious authority believes he witnessed, while preserving the central conflict between that testimony and Yolanda’s conviction that the bodies are gone.

Explosion and Return to the Scene

Later, Iriarte calls Amaia at nearly one in the morning with news from Ainhoa: Yolanda is critically injured after trying to open her children’s tomb with an explosive. She has lost several fingers and an eye and has been taken to Hospital Saint Collette for emergency surgery. Explosive-ordnance technicians from the French Gendarmerie are at the scene. The grave that had previously been approached with a crowbar has now become the site of a blast, with devastating consequences for Yolanda.

Amaia asks Iriarte to collect her with Jonan Etxaide. They reach Ainhoa at half past two, after waiting for Etxaide to return from Pamplona. The explosion had occurred around half past midnight; by the time they arrive, the explosives team has had time to inspect the area and neighbors have returned home, though forensic officers are still active. The gendarmes’ chief warns that their presence may anger the French judge. Amaia answers that they are European citizens who happened to be passing through, and he eventually lets them proceed.

The chief reports that Yolanda arrived at the cemetery around midnight, parked a high-end four-wheel-drive vehicle nearby, and placed about two hundred grams of explosive. Goma-2 is considered a possibility, not a confirmed identification. The investigators suspect a connection with explosives used in mining because Yolanda’s family owns a mine in Almandoz, but Amaia points out that theft from a mine would be difficult: since the Madrid attacks of 11 March, explosives are no longer stored in mine magazines, and material for each blast is transported and guarded, with unused quantities recorded and destroyed on site. At the cemetery, Amaia crosses the police cordon to check for herself. The priest, previously silent during the morning visit, now challenges her as she bends under the barrier. Ainhoa’s churchyard thus remains both a historic communal burial place and an active crime scene, where claims about the dead must be tested against what people say they saw.