Siglo XVII

Siglo XVII is the period in which the novel locates a historical investigation into witchcraft and a cluster of unresolved deaths and disappearances. Its importance lies not in proving an unbroken survival of the past, but in showing how that past becomes a disputed interpretive frame for later crimes in the Baztán Valley: testimony once dismissed as false can carry implications that the present investigation has reason to reconsider.

Historical Setting and Inquiry

As Sarasola recounts it, Salazar y Frías investigated the presence of evil in the valley when witch trials were at their height, extending the inquiry across the French border. He spent more than a year living among local people and, in Sarasola’s account, examined their practices with the care of a scientist and investigator: observing, questioning, and verifying what he discovered. Sarasola emphasizes that these practices were deeply rooted in local culture, older than the establishment of the Iglesia católica, and had become disturbingly fused with Christianity.

Sarasola’s description makes the inquiry significant for its method as well as its subject. He regards Salazar y Frías as unusually open-minded for his time and compares his investigative approach to Amaia Salazar’s own practice of checking each discovery. The comparison gives the seventeenth-century inquiry a role in the present story: it is not simply a record of superstition, but an earlier attempt to investigate claims that later authorities would treat as settled or discredited.

Testimony and the Unresolved Dead

Sarasola does not present the historical record as reliable in every respect. He acknowledges that the mere mention of the Inquisition could provoke panic and that people may have confessed to magical practices to escape torture. He approves of Salazar y Frías’s decision to end the abuses that had taken hold, while also stressing the cost of treating the entire body of testimony as false once the Inquisition’s methods were admitted.

Among the cases left unresolved were crimes against children under two and adolescent girls. Their deaths and the subsequent disappearance of their bodies appeared in numerous declarations, but those accounts were dismissed wholesale. The historical record therefore holds two possibilities together: coercion could distort confessions, yet the discrediting of those confessions could also bury evidence of real crimes. The missing bodies make that uncertainty especially consequential when Sarasola later considers the use of children’s remains in sacrificial practices.

The Past as a Lens on Later Events

Sarasola invokes this history while examining a photograph connected to an attempted sacrifice of Ibai. He interprets the image as showing the setting for a human offering and relates it to the profaned graves at Arizkun, where the remains included those of children. In his account, the use of human remains—particularly children’s remains—belongs to the practices under discussion, while killing a child as an offering represents a more extreme act. This is Sarasola’s interpretation of the evidence, not proof that the historical cases and the contemporary events form a single continuous practice.

The investigation later gives the river a central place in its own mapping of infant deaths. Amaia Salazar plots victims’ origins, including her sister’s, and finds that removing the Ainhoa cases leaves a line following the Baztán River. The mapped sequence extends from Erratzu through Arraioz, Elbete, and Elizondo, and onward to Oieregi. That modern pattern is not itself evidence about the seventeenth century; rather, it shows how the older accounts of deaths and missing bodies become newly legible when investigators revisit the history alongside present-day clues.

Historical Significance and Limits

The period functions as a source of questions, not a final explanation. Sarasola’s account challenges the easy assumption that every confession associated with witchcraft was either true or meaningless: torture compromised testimony, but blanket rejection may have concealed crimes. The novel thus makes the handling of evidence part of the historical problem, as important as the beliefs the Inquisition sought to suppress.

The connection between past and present remains suggestive rather than conclusive. Salazar y Frías’s investigation, the accounts of vanished bodies, the profanations at Arizkun, and the later map of deaths along the river illuminate one another without establishing that the same people, organization, or ritual persisted across the centuries. Siglo XVII matters because it leaves the present with an unresolved record—and with the responsibility to distinguish a genuine pattern from an inherited story.