The Basque panic that ran through Navarre and the surrounding country from 1609 is one of the largest witch scares in European history, and it ended in a way almost no other did: an official of the prosecuting body investigated it properly and reported that there was nothing there.
Salazar was the junior of three inquisitors at the tribunal of Logroño. At the auto de fe of November 1610 he dissented from his colleagues over the handling of the cases. Afterwards the Suprema, the governing council of the Spanish Inquisition, sent him out through the affected districts with an edict of grace, under which people could confess without penalty. He took an enormous quantity of testimony, most of it from children.
Then he did what nobody else had done. He checked. He went to the places named, looked for the physical traces the confessions described, examined the powders and ointments handed over, and set the statements against one another. Almost everyone who confessed to him later retracted when questioned separately. Where two accounts should have matched they did not. Nothing produced as evidence turned out to be anything.
His conclusion, in his report to the Suprema, was that there had been neither witches nor bewitched in the region until people began to talk and write about them. In 1611 that is an extraordinary sentence, and it was written by an inquisitor.