Nurse Hidalgo

Nurse Hidalgo is a midwife whose intimate knowledge of pregnancies in the Baztán Valley makes her a pivotal link between the families investigated by Amaia Salazar and the Argi Beltz network. Her role is defined by a disturbing duality: Flora remembers her as the nurse who stopped a dangerous hemorrhage, while the investigation uncovers evidence that Hidalgo may also have helped arrange the fate of unwanted infants.

Identity and Medical Work

Nurse Hidalgo had worked as a midwife in several hospitals and private clinics, including the Hospital Comarcal de Irún and clinics in Hondarribia and Irún. She had also been her brother’s assistant. These jobs gave her access to intimate information about pregnancies across the region, a professional position that later appeared to investigators as a source of privileged knowledge rather than a neutral background detail.

The records in Jonan Etxaide’s files included Hidalgo’s work history alongside a search warrant and basic personal information. Amaia Salazar recognized the significance of the clinics’ locations: the Baztán River changes its name to the Bidasoa farther downstream, but remains the same river. That geographical continuity helped turn Hidalgo’s employment history into a lead connecting infant deaths along the river’s course.

The Investigation and Argi Beltz

As the inquiry stalled, Amaia argued that Nurse Hidalgo was the link the team had overlooked. She had been a regular at the supposed bereavement-support meetings at Argi Beltz, and Amaia recalled that Hidalgo had suggested, without apparent shame, that she had helped some parents solve the problem of bringing certain children into the world. Amaia urged the investigators to keep looking into her. Fermín Montes took responsibility for that line of inquiry.

The theory was not based on her medical work alone. Her access to information about pregnancies, her presence at meetings ostensibly intended to comfort grieving families, and her insinuation that she had helped parents deal with unwanted births converged into a pattern that demanded scrutiny. The investigators broadened their search beyond the valley to all of Navarra, focusing on cases involving girls near the Baztán River and examining family finances before and after a child’s death. The proposed financial comparison was meant to establish whether families had benefited from their daughters’ deaths and thus reveal a recurring arrangement.

Flora’s Account

Flora’s recollection complicates any simple portrait of Nurse Hidalgo. After an illegal abortion across the border left Flora bleeding and gravely injured, her mother took her to Hidalgo. The nurse stopped the hemorrhage. At that point, Flora was still pregnant: the doctor had injured her and left her unable to have children, but had not ended the pregnancy.

Flora’s mother ruled out raising the baby and insisted that the child would be delivered, not adopted. She took Flora to Nurse Hidalgo, who was to help when the time came. Flora says she never met the group that would supposedly take care of everything. Yet Hidalgo’s assurances reminded her of the doctor’s promises, and she had heard of midwives who failed to tie newborns’ umbilical cords, leaving unwanted babies to die. Afraid of what might happen, Flora went to a charitable home in Pamplona at six months’ pregnancy. She gave birth there and gave the girl up for adoption, believing she would go to a good family. Years later, she recognized that child as Anne Arbizu. Her account presents Hidalgo as both the person who saved Flora in an emergency and the intermediary whose involvement carried a frightening possibility of infant death.

Discovery and Death

Jonan’s files gave the investigation a more concrete connection to Hidalgo. Among the documents were her employment records, which helped Amaia trace the river pattern, and an audio recording of Yolanda Berrueta’s police statement. Yolanda’s insistence that her children’s bodies were missing also showed how bereavement could be dismissed as delusion even when it pointed toward a crime: she later maintained that, had investigators simply confirmed the presence of her children in the tomb, the missing girl might never have been discovered.

After Jonan’s murder, authorities searched Argi Beltz in Orabidea and found evidence suggesting that Rosario had hidden there during her disappearance. When officers reached Nurse Hidalgo’s home in Irurita, they found her hanging from a rope attached to her walnut tree. The discovery came amid a wider reckoning: lawyers were arrested, and forensic specialists faced weeks of work identifying and dating the remains of girls found around an empty coffin. The investigation had moved from scattered suspicions about infant deaths to the exposure of a network whose victims’ bodies and identities had been concealed.

Narrative Significance

Nurse Hidalgo’s importance lies in the trust attached to her occupation. Midwifery placed her at the threshold between pregnancy and birth, where her knowledge could protect a mother or be exploited to conceal a child’s fate. The novel does not erase the fact that she treated Flora; instead, that act of care sharpens the unease around the later evidence. Her work history, her attendance at Argi Beltz, and Flora’s account create a portrait assembled from records and testimony, in which benevolent medical authority and suspected complicity remain uncomfortably close.