Valle de Baztán is more than the setting of the investigation: its villages and river corridor become evidence, gradually transforming apparently separate infant deaths into a geographic pattern. From the quiet around the Elizondo police station to the old house at Argi Beltz, the landscape holds both the histories the inquiry must recover and the distances that complicate its explanations.

Setting and landscape

The valley is presented through contrasts of light, sound, and visibility. After the dark, clouded sky over Pamplona, Amaia returns to a brighter, hazy sky in Valle de Baztán. The mist gives the landscape an unusual luminosity but obscures the distance. From the Elizondo police station, the day’s quiet makes the Baztán River audible at Txokoto, though the river is barely visible behind Elizondo’s centuries-old houses. The scene places the water close at hand yet partly concealed, an image that accords with an investigation in which the region’s connections are present before they can be read clearly.

Elizondo is also the working center from which the inquiry develops. There, Amaia studies forensic reports, photographs, and maps, and later places the suspected victims’ home villages onto a broader chart. The valley’s geography is thus encountered not only as scenery but as a practical investigative problem: locations must be compared across a region, and a line that is invisible in individual cases may emerge when their positions are considered together.

Argi Beltz and the older network

A farmhouse in Orabidea gives the landscape a history older than the immediate infant-death investigation. Elena Ochoa had told Amaia that a sect-like commune settled at a caserío there in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The group began with cultural and spiritual gatherings, then turned toward occult practices and animal sacrifice; the possibility of human sacrifice was raised, and Elena left when the rites became too savage. The group continued for a time after her departure.

When Amaia locates the house, it has been renovated into a guarded mansion inhabited by an affluent retired-age couple who belonged to the original group. A neighbor identifies Doctor Berasategui’s car at the property, and the couple acknowledge knowing him but answer Amaia’s questions about their relationship by handing her a card for Lejarreta y Andía. Their daughter’s history makes the address more than a remnant of the past: the couple say she died before the age of two during a trip to the United Kingdom, but investigators find no British death certificate, hospital record, or evidence of the journey. Her birth certificate records a home birth at Argi Beltz in Orabidea, signed by Doctor Hidalgo. The discrepancy links a specific house to the inquiry’s doubts about deaths that had been explained as natural or had no verifiable record of burial.

Mapping the deaths

The map changes as Amaia tests different ways of arranging the cases. At first, the villages do not seem to form a coherent shape. The file Jonan assembled includes the babies’ addresses and Amaia’s twin sister, but omits Yolanda Berrueta’s children. When Amaia marks the cases again, the points appear to follow the N-121, a plausible route for an offender seeking access and escape. She rejects that explanation: the road does not account for the distribution. Removing the Ainhoa cases from the map instead makes a narrow alignment visible, following the blue course of the Baztán River.

The river-based pattern gives the locations a different meaning. Amaia traces an apparent corridor from Erratzu through Arraioz, Elbete, and Elizondo, continuing toward Oieregi. The map does not by itself prove that the deaths share a cause, but it provides a structure for asking whether they do. It also changes the emotional scale of the inquiry: the marks represent children whose identities and circumstances may have been neglected, not simply points in a sequence.

As the investigation expands, Amaia asks for older cases to be plotted in another color. These include her sister in Elizondo, the girl associated with Argi Beltz, a child in Lesaka, the daughter of Lejarreta y Andía in Elbete, and a girl in Erratzu. With those earlier deaths added, the drawing follows the river from its source toward its mouth, where it takes the name Bidasoa. What had looked like a cluster within the valley becomes a longer, cross-regional succession of places along the waterway.

A corridor, not a verdict

The inquiry’s working pattern reaches beyond the valley’s central villages. Searches for infant deaths among communities bordering the river identify cases in Elizondo, Oronoz-Mugaire, Narbarte, Doneztebe, and Hondarribia; Hondarribia’s initial group is narrowed from four cases to two. Amaia’s map then joins these newer cases to older ones. The resulting geography extends across changing place names and administrative boundaries, making the river a useful organizing feature without making every nearby death automatically part of the same crime.

The distinction matters. Amaia’s map first tests the highway and then the river; each arrangement creates a different hypothesis, and neither geographic alignment alone establishes responsibility. The pattern gains investigative force when combined with other evidence: shared links to the old gatherings, families’ circumstances, suspicious responses to children’s deaths, and the absence of expected records in the Ainara Martínez Bayón case. Valle de Baztán therefore functions as a crime geography whose clues must be cross-checked, not as a landscape that explains itself. Its river offers a line through scattered events, while the villages and houses along that line preserve the separate records the investigation must still prove connected.