Irún is a practical and investigative waypoint in the inquiry into suspicious infant deaths: Nurse Hidalgo worked there as a midwife, a therapy group there becomes relevant to Dr. Berasategui’s influence, and the city’s legal and cemetery connections offer a possible route to further examination. Its importance is not that the investigation proves every strand began there, but that Irún helps extend the case beyond the Baztán Valley and toward the wider river corridor.

City, Work, and Investigation

The city appears first as a place of ordinary movement and work. When Amaia Salazar and Fermín Montes arrive for a meeting, school departures, the end of the working day, and afternoon shopping have crowded the center. After circling for a while, they leave their cars in an underground car park and meet a woman and her father in a café. The scene gives Irún a busy civic scale: the investigation unfolds amid the routines of a populated town, rather than in the remote houses and burial places that have dominated earlier inquiries.

That meeting also brings local authority into the case. The woman’s father identifies himself as Irún’s judge of peace. He cannot authorize the opening of a family tomb of his own, but explains that the municipality has no objection to opening the family mausoleum for repairs or replacement of its stonework or interior structure, provided the work takes place after the cemetery closes at eight in the evening. He distinguishes that limited permission from the more serious act of opening a coffin: an undertaker should not do so unless there is strong evidence that it is empty. Signs that the coffin has been tampered with, he says, would provide grounds to seek the proper judicial order. He also offers a route to permission to inspect another family tomb if evidence warrants it. Amaia replies that a judge in Pamplona is handling the case and can issue any necessary request. Irún thus provides procedural help without replacing the investigation’s established judicial authority.

Medical Work and the River Corridor

Irún’s strongest connection to the central inquiry comes through Nurse Hidalgo’s employment history. Amaia reviews the career information in Jonan Etxaide’s files and finds that, before retiring, Hidalgo worked at the regional hospital in Irún. Earlier, she had worked at two private clinics: one in Hondarribia and another in Irún. In all of these positions, she worked as a midwife. The detail matters because the investigation concerns the deaths of very young children, and because Hidalgo’s professional movements may have brought her into contact with families well beyond a single town.

The river’s changing name supplies the geographical logic for widening the search. Amaia realizes that the Baztán River does not end where the investigation had effectively stopped looking: after Oronoz-Mugaire, and farther downstream beyond Doneztebe, it is known as the Bidasoa River, crosses out of Navarra into Guipúzcoa, and reaches the Cantabrian Sea. Since Hidalgo worked in Irún, Amaia reasons that, if she acted as a recruiter for families involved in the suspected practices, her influence might have extended wherever her work took her. She tells Montes to have Zabalza broaden the search from infant deaths in Navarra to cases in Guipúzcoa, with particular attention to girls who lived near the Bidasoa River.

The widening of the map is a change in investigative method, not proof of a connection by itself. A later count identifies cases in Elizondo, Oronoz-Mugaire, Narbarte, Doneztebe, and Hondarribia among populations adjoining the river. When older cases are added—including deaths associated with Elizondo, Argi Beltz, Lesaka, Elbete, and Erratzu—the marked locations form a succession from the river’s source to its mouth. Irún matters within this enlarged geography as part of the region where the Bidasoa name and the investigation’s search area meet; the evidence prompts inquiry there rather than establishing that every death along the route had the same cause.

Irún and the Suspected Network

The city also appears in the history of therapy received by Víctor Oyarzabal, known as Basajaun. He had told Amaia that he attended a discreet therapy group in Irún, rather than a group associated with the parish. Amaia later asks Sarasola whether Berasategui’s encrypted files show that the doctor treated Oyarzabal. Sarasola nods. The exchange connects a therapeutic setting in Irún with the inquiry into how Berasategui may have encountered and influenced men whose violence became part of the wider case. It also shows how professional and personal histories, initially separate from the river map, can become investigative leads.

This connection must be kept distinct from the more direct evidence about the suspected groups in Baztán and Lesaka. Irún is not identified as the site of their rituals. Instead, it figures as a place where one suspect sought therapy and where Hidalgo held midwifery posts, while the investigation tests whether those separate forms of access intersected with the families under scrutiny. The city’s significance lies in that investigative possibility and in the records and people through which it can be tested.

A Base for Extending the Inquiry

Irún therefore serves several different functions without becoming a single explanatory answer. Its crowded center is where investigators meet a family willing to discuss access to a tomb; its medical workplaces belong to Nurse Hidalgo’s documented career; and its therapy group belongs to the account Oyarzabal gave of his treatment. Together, these details help move the inquiry outward from the original cluster of deaths and toward a broader network of places, occupations, and relationships.

The resulting geography is deliberately larger than the first map. Once Amaia recognizes that the Baztán and Bidasoa names designate successive stretches of the same river, the provincial boundary no longer provides a sensible stopping point. Irún becomes important not as a proven center of the suspected crimes, but as a threshold in the search: a town where the medical trail, the therapy history, the legal process, and the downstream river corridor all come into view.