Argi Beltz mansion is the renovated country house that Amaia Salazar traces to Elena Ochoa’s account of an old gathering place for a secretive group. Its present-day appearance—wealthy, modern, and heavily secured—initially conceals the older property beneath it; a photograph eventually confirms that the house stands on the same flat meadow Elena described.

Setting and Discovery

Following Elena Ochoa’s directions, Amaia searches the countryside for a house associated with events from decades earlier. She nearly overlooks the property: although a broad, perfectly level green meadow surrounds it, an old wall thick with vegetation screens the entire approach. A green-painted cast-iron mailbox is barely visible among the growth. Beyond the wall, a vine-covered fence leads to a modern entrance beneath a stone canopy, equipped with a video intercom and marked by a security company’s plaque. The name Argi Beltz, carved by hand into a length of wood, sits beside this conspicuously modern protection.

The house behind the concealed entrance seems at first to contradict Elena’s description. It has a red pitched roof, wide front windows, a wooden porch, and a large outdoor dining table beside a modern barbecue. Amaia considers whether the land might have been reshaped and a new house built over the old one. When she rings the intercom several times without receiving an answer, she thinks she hears a small click from the device and feels watched. The silence irritates her more than it frightens her, but the mismatch between the contemporary mansion and the remembered house leaves her uncertain that she has found the right place.

A photograph supplied by a local woman resolves that uncertainty. The woman brings out an old cocoa tin filled with photographs and selects one taken about fifty years earlier, when her parents were rebuilding the farmhouse chimney after a lightning strike. In the image, a man in work clothes and a txapela stands beside the large chimney; behind him is an older farmhouse with a dark roof, set in the same flat meadow. The building has since been extensively changed, but the photograph establishes that it is the very house Amaia sought.

Former Inhabitants and the Group

A neighbor’s account gives the property a history older and more violent than its renovated exterior suggests. According to a story passed down by her grandmother, the farmhouse had belonged to two brothers and their sister. Their mother had died young, and their father, overcome by grief and considered mentally ill, was chained to a bed in the attic. The brothers treated their sister cruelly and kept her from marrying so that she could work for them. When she fell in love with a horse trader and he came to take her away, one brother directed him to a barrel containing her dismembered body. The trader fought the brothers, killing one and escaping; the other hanged himself. When the Guardia Civil searched the house, they found the father’s mummified corpse still chained in the attic. The farmhouse was closed for more than seventy years, while local people said the family’s spirits remained trapped inside. Amaia notes the dates mentally, treating the story as a lead to check rather than an explanation of what happened there.

The investigation connects the house to a different, more recent history. Elena Ochoa had told Amaia that a commune settled in a farmhouse in Orabidea in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Its meetings, initially cultural and spiritual, moved toward occult practices and animal sacrifice; the prospect of human sacrifice was enough for Elena to leave, although the group continued for a time. Amaia identifies the renovated property as that former gathering place and learns that its present owners, a wealthy couple around retirement age, belonged to the original group. They acknowledge knowing Berasategui, but respond to questions about their relationship by handing her a card for Lejarreta y Andía, their lawyers. A neighbor also tells Amaia that the couple had a baby daughter who died; when Amaia asks about the child, the couple react with marked agitation.

As Amaia later sets out the case, the couple’s account is that their daughter died before the age of two during a trip to the United Kingdom. Investigators find no death certificate, hospital record, or evidence of the trip, despite the travel documentation required for a child at the time. The discrepancy turns the mansion from a concealed historical address into a point of inquiry in the suspected pattern of infant deaths. Its present respectability and security do not erase the group’s past: the house links Elena’s testimony, the owners’ former membership, and Berasategui’s acknowledged visits to the same place.

Cult Connections and Police Aftermath

Later testimony places Argi Beltz within a network of occult groups active in Lesaka and Baztán in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Xabier Markina, who also directed an expensive clinic in Las Rozas, was identified as the network’s spiritual leader and the person who introduced its members to occult practices. A witness in police custody said he had participated in and witnessed the sacrifice of a newborn girl at a farmhouse in Lesaka. He also said that members visited the group at Argi Beltz, where they were preparing for a similar sacrifice. His account identified Amaia Salazar’s mother as one of the mansion’s group members. The testimony links the house to preparations for ritual violence, but does not establish that a sacrifice took place there.

The couple’s daughter, who died at fourteen months, becomes part of this account through the missing records surrounding her supposed death during a trip to the United Kingdom. Amaia reports that no death certificate, autopsy report, burial record, or entry for the child in her parents’ passports can be found. Separately, the father of Berasategui confessed that he and his wife had given their first daughter to the group’s practice; he said his wife’s depression followed from this, and that she could not love their subsequent son. Together with the witness’s identification of Berasategui’s visits to Argi Beltz and photographs showing vehicles outside the house, these disclosures make the mansion a junction in the investigation’s account of infant deaths, group membership, and concealment—not merely the setting of an old secretive commune.

After Jonan Etxaide’s murder, police from the Elizondo station took charge of Argi Beltz. Initial indications suggested that Rosario Salazar may have used the property as a hiding place during the period when she was missing. The search therefore returned Amaia’s inquiry to the same secured house she had first approached without being admitted: now its significance lay not only in what the neighbors remembered or the photograph proved, but in the possibility that it had sheltered a fugitive while investigators pursued the group’s crimes.

Name, Memory, and Narrative Significance

The name Argi Beltz carries the contradiction that shapes the house’s role in the investigation: Amaia Salazar understands it as “black light,” and it recalls Elena Ochoa’s description of a black house. The name does not prove what happened there, but it makes the property a point where remembered language and a present-day address meet. Amaia’s inquiry depends on separating that suggestive association from verifiable particulars: the neighbor’s dated family story, the photograph of the earlier farmhouse, the owners’ connection to the group, and testimony about its preparations for violence.

The mansion’s changes of appearance sharpen that distinction. Its renovated, protected exterior belongs to the present; the older house and its history persist beneath it, recoverable through witnesses and records rather than through appearance alone. The novel does not establish that a sacrifice took place at Argi Beltz. Instead, the testimony places the house among the locations connected to a network preparing for ritual violence, while the later police search and the possibility that Rosario Salazar sheltered there give the property a continuing role in the investigation. Argi Beltz thus becomes more than a recovered address: it is a place where a concealed past remains consequential without every rumor about it becoming fact.