The Forced Labour Road to Villa Winter
Sometime around 1946, a column of men walked single file along a track carved into volcanic rock on the southern edge of Fuerteventura. They were prisoners from the Tefía penal colony — convicts, political dissidents, and men imprisoned under Franco's vagrancy laws for the crime of being homosexual. They carried stones. They hauled water across a landscape so barren it looked extraterrestrial. Armed guards walked with them, and every evening, without exception, the men were escorted back across the mountain pass before dark. They were building a road to a place they were forbidden to discuss, for a man most of them would never meet.
The road led to Cofete, a village of goatherds and fishermen clinging to the western slope of the Jandía Peninsula — the most isolated stretch of land in the Canary Islands. At the end of that road, on a hill overlooking a wild Atlantic beach, a structure was taking shape. It had the proportions of a country estate: two storeys, a courtyard, a balustraded terrace, a family coat of arms above the entrance. It also had walls nearly one and a half metres thick, reinforced corridors with arched ceilings engineered to absorb blast waves, and a tower with a 360-degree view of the sea. The man who commissioned it was a German electrical engineer named Gustav Winter, and on paper, he was building a farmhouse.
Villa Winter is the Canary Islands' most durable mystery — not because the facts are explosive, but because the facts are just ambiguous enough to support almost any theory. U-boat refuelling station. Plastic surgery clinic for fleeing war criminals. Transit point on the Nazi ratline to Argentina. Adolf Hitler's personal refuge. Each claim sounds absurd until you stand in the basement and see the thickness of the walls. The real story of Villa Winter is not about what happened inside it. It is about what happens when a man with intelligence connections builds a fortified house on a sealed-off peninsula in the middle of the Atlantic, and then no government — Spanish, German, British, or American — ever forces him to explain why.
Who Was Gustav Winter? The German Engineer Behind Fuerteventura's Darkest Mystery
Gustav Oskar Winter was born in 1893 in Neustadt, a small town in Germany's Black Forest region near Freiburg. He trained as an engineer, left Germany in 1913 for Argentina, and the following year attempted to return to Europe by ship. British naval intelligence intercepted the vessel in the English Channel. Winter, suspected of espionage, was arrested and held for several months. He later described his release in February 1915 as a "spectacular escape" — a dramatic embellishment that would become characteristic. The British had released him on the condition that he not return to Germany. He went to Spain instead.
Over the following decade, Winter reinvented himself. He completed his engineering qualifications in Spain, worked on power plant projects in Zaragoza, Ciudad Real, and Valencia, and cultivated relationships with the Spanish upper class. By the mid-1920s, he had established himself as a capable, well-connected operator — a German abroad who understood both machines and men.
Gustav Winter and the CICER Power Plant in Gran Canaria
In 1926, Winter took a position that would define the rest of his life. He became managing director of CICER — the Compañía Insular Colonial de Electricidad y Riegos — and oversaw the construction of a major power plant on Las Canteras beach in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. The facility, named after King Alfonso XIII, opened in October 1928 after an astonishingly short construction period. It was considered a showcase of German engineering efficiency, and it made Winter a known and respected figure across the archipelago. Locals called him Don Gustavo.
During his time on Gran Canaria, Winter visited the neighbouring islands of Lanzarote and Fuerteventura. The Jandía Peninsula — a stark, mountainous spit of land jutting into the Atlantic at Fuerteventura's southern tip — captivated him. It was approximately 14,000 hectares of arid volcanic terrain, home to a handful of goatherds and fishermen, and almost completely cut off from the rest of the island. There was no paved road. There was barely a footpath. Winter saw something in it that nobody else did, and he did not let go.
He returned to Germany in 1929 with his first wife Johanna and their six children. For several years, he worked as an engineer in Switzerland for a luxury watch manufacturer and registered patents for industrial machinery he had invented. But the Jandía Peninsula remained lodged in his mind. When the political landscape in Germany shifted, Winter's vision for that remote stretch of Atlantic coastline suddenly found funding.
How Gustav Winter Leased the Entire Jandía Peninsula in 1937
The timing was precise. In 1937 — four years into the Third Reich, one year into the Spanish Civil War — Winter signed a lease for the entire Jandía Peninsula with the heirs of Enrique de Queralt, the Conde de Santa Coloma, based in Lanzarote. He then travelled to Berlin.
What happened in Berlin has been disputed for eighty years. The legend — repeated in multiple accounts and never definitively confirmed or debunked — holds that Winter secured funding from the apparatus of Hermann Göring's Four Year Plan, the economic programme designed to make Germany self-sufficient and ready for war. Winter founded a company called the Atlantische Industrie Gesellschaft (AIG), registered in Germany, whose stated purpose was the creation and exploitation of fishing, metallurgical, chemical, and pottery-related enterprises "nationally and internationally, mainly in the Canary Islands." By 1938, a small Winter-led expedition had travelled to Fuerteventura to photograph and chart the peninsula. German workers began arriving for what were described as "economically important projects for the Third Reich."
At the same time, Allied intelligence began to take an interest. Winter's name would later surface in Abwehr files — the German military intelligence agency — though the precise nature of his role remains unclear. He was, at minimum, a German national with connections to the regime operating in a strategically critical location. Whether he was an ideological Nazi, a pragmatic opportunist, or a full-fledged intelligence operative depends entirely on which file you read and which decade it was written in.
The Canary Islands in World War II: Franco, Hitler, and Operation Felix
The Canary Islands sit roughly 100 kilometres off the northwest coast of Africa — closer to the Sahara than to mainland Spain. In 1940, they were among the most strategically valuable pieces of real estate in the Atlantic. Whoever controlled the Canaries controlled the sea lanes between Europe, Africa, and the Americas. The British knew this. The Germans knew it better.
Spain's dictator Francisco Franco owed his power to Hitler and Mussolini. German aircraft and Italian troops had been decisive in the Nationalist victory in the Spanish Civil War, which had ended only in April 1939. Franco's debt was enormous, and Hitler intended to collect — not with money, but with geography.
The Hendaye Meeting of 1940 and Hitler's Demand for the Canary Islands
On 23 October 1940, Franco's train pulled into the station at Hendaye, a French town on the Atlantic coast just metres from the Spanish border. Hitler was already waiting. The meeting — the only time the two dictators would meet face to face — was supposed to finalise Spain's entry into the war on the Axis side.
The plan was called Operation Felix. German forces — two army corps, an SS division, a Luftwaffe corps — would cross Spain, seize Gibraltar, and lock the British out of the western Mediterranean. The Canary Islands would serve as forward bases for U-boats and Luftwaffe aircraft, projecting Axis power deep into the Atlantic shipping lanes. Franco arrived late. The talks lasted seven hours. They collapsed completely.
Franco's demands were staggering: Gibraltar, French Morocco, part of French Algeria, French Cameroon attached to Spanish Guinea, plus massive shipments of grain, fuel, armoured vehicles, and aircraft. In return, he offered Germany a single Canary Island for a naval base. Hitler, unwilling to alienate Vichy France by carving up its colonies, refused. Franco expressed doubt that Germany could actually defeat Britain — a comment that visibly enraged the Führer. The men parted without an agreement. Days later, meeting Mussolini in Florence, Hitler said he would rather have three or four teeth pulled than speak to Franco again.
Operation Felix was shelved. Spain remained officially neutral. But "neutral" in Franco's Spain was a flexible concept, and the Canary Islands were about to prove it.
German U-Boats Resupplying in the Canary Islands During WWII
Between March and July 1941, six German U-boats made successive port calls at Las Palmas harbour under the code name Culebra. They resupplied from the MV Corrientes, an ostensibly "interned" German merchant vessel that was anything but idle. The submarines — U-124, U-105, U-106, U-123, U-69, and U-103 — refuelled, restocked, and returned to the Battle of the Atlantic. Spain looked the other way.
The evidence of German naval activity in the Canaries was everywhere. On 6 April 1943, a British fighter aircraft attacked U-167 in Canary waters. The crew managed to bring the crippled submarine to the south of Gran Canaria, where it sank. British intelligence was monitoring German naval activity across the archipelago, and the Canary Islands' role as an informal logistics hub for the Kriegsmarine was an open secret in Allied intelligence circles. The question was never whether the Germans were operating in the Canaries. The question was how deeply — and whether the isolated, fortified house being built on the Jandía Peninsula was part of the infrastructure.
Inside Villa Winter: The Bunker Disguised as a Country Estate
The house at Cofete occupies a position that makes sense only if you are trying to see without being seen. It sits on a slight rise at the foot of Pico de la Zarza, Fuerteventura's highest peak at 807 metres, with the volcanic ridge of the Jandía massif behind it and Playa de Cofete — a 12-kilometre stretch of wild, unswimmable Atlantic beach — in front. The nearest settlement is Cofete village, home to roughly 30 people then and now. The nearest town, Morro Jable, is 20 kilometres away by dirt track. In the 1940s, before the road existed, you could only reach Cofete on foot or by boat.
The villa has two floors, a central courtyard, a balustraded front terrace, and a tower in the northeastern corner. Crocodile gargoyles adorn the exterior. The Winter family coat of arms is carved above the entrance. On the surface, it looks like an eccentric colonial estate — the kind of house a wealthy European might build as a statement of ambition in a remote corner of the empire. But the surface is a lie, and the structure beneath it is something else entirely.
Villa Winter's Blast-Proof Walls and Secret Basement
A 2019 episode of the UK documentary series Secret Nazi Bases brought cameras inside Villa Winter for the first time. What they found was consistent with decades of local testimony: the building's interior is constructed to military specifications. The walls are approximately 1.4 metres thick — roughly six feet — where a domestic villa of comparable size would have walls of 25 centimetres. The basement corridors are built with reinforced walls and arched ceilings, a design signature found across German military bunkers built during WWII by the Todt Organisation, engineered specifically to deflect blast-wave impacts.
Pedro Fumero Matos, the villa's current resident and self-appointed custodian, told the documentary crew that he had played in the basement as a child. He remembered seeing shackles in a windowless room barely wide enough for a person's arms to be fixed to opposite walls. Fumero said he had investigated to a depth of 1.3 metres beneath the house but was forbidden by local authorities to excavate further, despite suspecting the existence of hidden cavities below.
The construction workforce was drawn from prison camps. Local accounts consistently describe armed guards on site during the building period, with workers brought in during daylight and removed before nightfall. The Jandía Peninsula had been fenced off from the rest of Fuerteventura, with a single access point secured by a gate and armed sentries. The people who lived and worked on the peninsula — the medianeros who farmed the land under feudal conditions — were prohibited from leaving without permission. The place operated, for all practical purposes, as a private fiefdom with its own borders and its own rules, hidden at the end of an island that most Spaniards had never heard of.
The Cofete Airstrip and Villa Winter's Lighthouse Tower
Winter also constructed an airstrip near Cofete village — a gravel runway roughly a kilometre long, traces of which are still visible from the air. The purpose of an airstrip in one of the most remote and sparsely populated corners of the Canary Islands was never satisfactorily explained. Legend holds that the Fuerteventura government eventually denied Winter permission to use it, forcing him to develop alternative transport via a pier at Puertito de la Cruz.
The villa's tower contained an electric lantern mounted in its turret — a rotating light with a 360-degree sweep, functionally identical to a lighthouse. Thick electrical cables reportedly ran from the villa toward the coast. The fuse box in the tower was described as vastly oversized for a domestic residence. Generators and antennas allegedly capable of long-range radio communication were noted by investigators, though none of this equipment survives in verifiable condition today.
Local fishermen provided the most persistent testimony. Multiple accounts, passed down across generations in Cofete and Morro Jable, describe sightings of German military personnel on the southern coast of Fuerteventura during and after the war. Fishermen reported seeing U-boats surfacing near the coastline and aircraft arriving at irregular intervals. Pedro Fumero's grandfather, who was part of the original construction workforce, told him he regularly saw German soldiers on site. These accounts are anecdotal, undocumented, and impossible to verify at this distance. They are also remarkably consistent.
Villa Winter Conspiracy Theories: From U-Boats to Nazi Ratlines
Villa Winter generates conspiracy theories the way a reef generates coral — layer upon layer, each one building on the last, until the original structure is almost invisible beneath the accumulation. The theories range from the plausible to the fantastical, and they thrive precisely because no authority has ever provided a definitive counter-narrative.
Was Villa Winter a Nazi Escape Route to South America?
The most persistent theory holds that Villa Winter functioned as a waystation on the Nazi ratlines — the escape networks that smuggled war criminals out of Europe after 1945. The geography supports the logic: Fuerteventura sits on the direct Atlantic route between Europe and South America, and a fortified house on an isolated, privately controlled peninsula with its own airstrip and potential submarine access would have been an ideal transit point.
The most lurid variation of this theory claims that the villa housed surgical facilities where fleeing Nazis underwent facial reconstruction to alter their appearances before continuing to Argentina, Brazil, or Paraguay. Names invoked in the legend include Josef Mengele, Martin Bormann, and Adolf Eichmann — and in the wildest versions, Hitler himself. There is no documentary evidence that any of these individuals ever set foot on Fuerteventura. The plastic surgery theory draws its power not from proof but from the fact that real ratlines did operate through Franco's Spain, that real war criminals did reach South America, and that Villa Winter's physical characteristics — the isolation, the fortification, the secrecy — are exactly what such an operation would have required.
The broader context is documented fact. Thousands of former Nazis escaped through Spain and Portugal after the war, many with the tacit or active cooperation of Franco's government, which shared the regime's anti-communist ideology and had no interest in honouring Allied extradition demands. The routes to Barrio Pablo Escobar and the cartels of Medellín would later follow some of the same smuggling corridors through the Atlantic — different cargo, identical logic.
Gustav Winter on the Allied Spy List and the Declassified CIA Report
In 1997, Spanish journalist and investigator José María Irujo published a list of 104 individuals the Allied forces had demanded Spain repatriate in 1945 — suspected German agents operating on Spanish soil during the war. Gustav Winter's name was on the list. He was identified as a Nazi agent responsible for supplying materials to submarines in the Canary Islands.
A declassified CIA report from the era also referenced a "man named Winter" acting for the Nazis in the Canary Islands, though the language was reportedly speculative rather than conclusive — intelligence assessment, not legal evidence. Spain never surrendered Winter. He was never charged, never tried, never deported. He lived openly in the Canary Islands for another quarter-century. The Spanish government's refusal to act on the Allied demand was consistent with Franco's broader policy of sheltering useful Germans, but it also ensured that the question of what Gustav Winter actually did during the war would never receive an official answer.
The parallel with Camp Peary — the CIA's training facility hidden behind the cover story of a military reservation — is instructive. Both sites demonstrate how intelligence infrastructure hides in plain sight: behind a plausible civilian purpose, a remote location, and an institutional refusal to confirm or deny.
Gustav Winter's Postwar Life on Fuerteventura (1947–1971)
Gustav Winter returned to Fuerteventura in 1947 or 1948 — sources differ on the exact year — accompanied by his second wife, Elisabeth Althaus, a young German woman he had met in Madrid in 1945. He settled in Morro Jable and immediately reasserted control over the Jandía Peninsula with a firmness that suggested he had never really left.
The peninsula was fenced off. Armed guards controlled the only access point. Local farmers — the medianeros — worked the land under conditions that residents later described as harsh and exploitative. Winter established the Casas de Jorós tomato plantations, drilled wells, and attempted to reforest the mountains of Jandía. These were legitimate agricultural enterprises, and they formed the official justification for Winter's presence: an industrious German engineer developing an underused piece of Spanish land.
Around 1950, residents of the Jandía Peninsula reported several days of unexplained explosions. When the blasting stopped, the villa at Cofete had been expanded to its current form, having received approval for construction work. What exactly was demolished or sealed during those explosions has never been determined. The timing — years after the war's end, in a period when any surviving evidence of wartime activity would have been a liability — has fuelled speculation that Winter was destroying compromising infrastructure.
In 1962, the Dehesa de Jandía S.A. — the company Winter had administered since the 1940s — transferred full ownership of the entire Jandía Peninsula to him personally, as compensation for his decades of development work. The German engineer who had arrived with a lease now owned one of the largest private landholdings in the Canary Islands.
The 1971 Stern Interview and Gustav Winter's Rewritten Timeline
In 1971, the German magazine Stern secured an interview with the ageing Winter at his home in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. It would be his only known press interview, and it was remarkable for what it omitted. Winter claimed he had not built the villa at Cofete until "late 1958" — a statement contradicted by municipal records, construction permits filed in 1949, local testimony, aerial photographs, and the documented use of prison labour in the 1940s. He said nothing about the war years. He offered no explanation for the military-grade construction. He did not address the Allied espionage allegations.
Winter died in Las Palmas in November 1971 at the age of 78. He had lived in Spain for fifty-six years, survived two world wars, operated across multiple countries under multiple regimes, and never been held to account by any government for anything. His family denied all Nazi connections. His neighbours told different stories. The villa sat empty, slowly decaying, holding whatever it held.
The pattern — a man reinventing his timeline, compressing decades of ambiguity into a harmless narrative of agricultural enterprise — echoes the postwar survival strategies seen across sites shaped by dictatorial complicity. At Palazzo Venezia, the architecture of fascist power was repurposed and minimised. At Villa Winter, the architecture simply went unquestioned.
Villa Winter Today: Pedro Fumero and the Ongoing Investigation
The villa's heirs began renovating it in 1985. Until the early 1990s, a private security company kept curious visitors away. Eventually, ownership passed to a Spanish construction company, and the property was left in the care of a man who would dedicate his life to prying it open.
Pedro Fumero Matos grew up in the shadow of Villa Winter. His grandfather and another relative were part of the original construction workforce, and the stories they told him — of German soldiers, of sealed rooms, of things underground — became the foundation of an obsession. Fumero now lives in the villa as its caretaker, researcher, and unofficial museum director. He opens it to visitors for a small tip, walks them through the rooms, and shares what he has found.
What Lies Under Villa Winter? Sealed Cavities and Forbidden Excavation
Fumero's claims are dramatic and not independently verified. He maintains that the villa sits atop an extended volcanic cave system with a connection to the sea, that German submarines are still hidden in these caves, and that the site functioned as a strategic logistics hub connecting Germany with South America. His childhood memory of shackles in a windowless basement room is consistent with the villa's documented military-grade construction but has not been corroborated by archaeological investigation.
In 2015, Austrian-German journalist Alexander Peer launched a multi-year research project aimed at separating fact from fiction. He visited archives in Germany, Austria, Spain, Great Britain, France, Switzerland, and the United States. He conducted interviews with historians, professors, journalists, and eyewitnesses. He combed through city, state, and university archives, searching for documents that could either confirm or demolish the legend. His findings, compiled in the forthcoming book Mythos Winter — Die Wahrheit über den deutschen Ingenieur Gustav Oskar Winter, promise to be the most comprehensive investigation to date.
The fundamental problem is one of evidence. Eighty years of silence, a deliberate destruction of records (if the 1950 explosions were indeed cover-up demolitions), and the deaths of all direct witnesses have created a historical void that is structurally resistant to definitive answers. Villa Winter may never be fully explained — not because the truth doesn't exist, but because the people who knew it ensured it would be extraordinarily difficult to find. In this respect, it belongs to the same category as Area 51 — a site where the absence of official explanation has become the most powerful explanation of all.
How to Visit Villa Winter in Fuerteventura
The drive from Morro Jable to Villa Winter is an experience in itself — a slow, jolting negotiation with 20 kilometres of unpaved road that winds through the Jandía Nature Park, flanked by volcanic ridges and ravines. The landscape is magnificent and hostile: burnt ochre rock, skeletal vegetation, and the Atlantic glinting far below. There is no phone signal for most of the drive. The isolation is not metaphorical. When the villa appears at the base of the mountain, flanked by Pico de la Zarza above and the endless grey-gold sweep of Cofete beach below, the effect is immediate and unsettling. This is a house that was built to be hard to reach, and it still is.
Directions, Opening Hours, and Tour Options from Morro Jable
A 4x4 vehicle is recommended, though the track is technically passable in a standard car with patience and a willingness to accept damage to the underside. Organised minibus tours depart from Morro Jable at scheduled times (typically 10:00 and 14:00) for approximately €2.50 per person. The villa is open to visitors Tuesday through Sunday, from 10:00 to 14:00 and 15:00 to 17:00. Pedro Fumero is usually present and will guide visitors through the accessible areas of the building, including portions of the basement, for a voluntary tip. Photography is generally permitted. Much of the building remains sealed, and the deeper basement levels are off-limits.
The villa is located at approximately 28.104°N, 14.403°W, near the hamlet of Cofete on the Jandía Peninsula. The nearest accommodation and services are in Morro Jable. There are no shops or facilities in Cofete itself, though a small restaurant — Restaurante Cofete Pepe El Faro — has opened in recent years.
Playa de Cofete: Fuerteventura's Wildest Beach
Playa de Cofete has been called the loneliest place in Spain, and the description is earned. Twelve kilometres of coarse golden sand stretch between volcanic headlands, pounded by Atlantic swells that make swimming dangerous year-round. There are no sunbeds, no bars, no lifeguards, no buildings beyond the handful of houses in Cofete village. The beach is frequently deserted. The wind does not stop.
Standing at Villa Winter and looking out at this landscape, the question that lingers is not whether Gustav Winter was a Nazi spy. It is simpler and harder than that. It is why a man would build a fortress at the end of the earth and spend thirty years pretending it was a farmhouse — and why every institution that could have demanded an answer chose not to ask.
The villa is not a monument to guilt or innocence. It is a monument to the power of silence — to what happens when a strategic location, a compromised government, a well-connected foreigner, and a war's worth of secrets converge in a place so remote that the truth can be buried without anyone noticing it's gone. The concrete is cracking. The gargoyles are weathering. The wind off the Atlantic is patient, and it has all the time in the world.
FAQ
Where is Villa Winter in Fuerteventura?
Villa Winter is situated on the Jandía Peninsula in the southwestern corner of Fuerteventura, the second-largest of Spain's Canary Islands. The villa sits near the tiny hamlet of Cofete, at the base of Pico de la Zarza (807 metres), overlooking Playa de Cofete on the Atlantic coast. It is approximately 20 kilometres from the town of Morro Jable, accessible only via an unpaved dirt track through the Jandía Nature Park.
Who built Villa Winter and when was it constructed?
Villa Winter was built by Gustav Winter, a German electrical engineer born in 1893 in the Black Forest region of Germany. The construction timeline is disputed: local residents and archival records place the initial building phase between 1937 and the late 1940s, with a significant expansion around 1950. Winter himself claimed in a 1971 interview with Stern magazine that he did not build the villa until 1958, a claim contradicted by multiple sources including municipal construction permits filed in 1949.
Was Villa Winter really a Nazi base?
There is no definitive proof that Villa Winter served as an operational Nazi military facility. Gustav Winter's name appeared on a 1945 Allied list of 104 suspected German agents in Spain, and a declassified CIA report referenced a "man named Winter" linked to Nazi activities in the Canaries. Six German U-boats resupplied at Las Palmas harbour during the war. The villa's military-grade construction — walls 1.4 metres thick, blast-resistant arched ceilings, and a tower resembling a lighthouse — is consistent with a military or intelligence function, but no government has ever officially confirmed or denied such a role.
Can you visit Villa Winter today?
Villa Winter is open to visitors Tuesday through Sunday, from 10:00 to 14:00 and 15:00 to 17:00. The villa functions as an informal museum run by its resident caretaker, Pedro Fumero Matos, who provides guided tours of accessible areas including parts of the basement. Entry is by voluntary tip. Visitors can reach the villa by 4x4 vehicle or via organised minibus tours departing from Morro Jable for approximately €2.50 per person.
What conspiracy theories surround Villa Winter?
The most prominent theories include: that the villa served as a U-boat resupply and signalling station for the German Kriegsmarine; that it housed surgical facilities where fleeing Nazis underwent facial reconstruction before escaping to South America; that it was a transit point on the ratlines used by war criminals including Mengele, Bormann, and Eichmann; and in the most extreme versions, that it served as a refuge for Adolf Hitler himself. None of these theories have been substantiated with documentary evidence, though the villa's physical characteristics and Winter's intelligence connections make them difficult to dismiss entirely.
What is the connection between Villa Winter and Franco's Spain?
Gustav Winter operated on Fuerteventura with the tacit support of Franco's regime. The Jandía Peninsula was fenced off with armed guards, construction used forced labour from the nearby Tefía penal colony, and Winter's land acquisitions were facilitated through Spanish intermediaries. Franco's Spain maintained close but officially deniable ties with Nazi Germany throughout the war, allowing German U-boats to resupply at Las Palmas and sheltering suspected German agents after 1945. Spain never extradited Winter despite Allied demands.
Sources
- [Gustav Winter: Biography and Timeline] - Casa Winter Research Group / Investigación Fumero (2021)
- [The Legend of Villa Winter] - Alexander Peer, VillaWinter.com Research Project (2019)
- [Spain During World War II: Neutrality, Non-Belligerence, and Axis Cooperation] - Stanley G. Payne, University of Wisconsin Press (2008)
- [Operation Felix: The Planned German Seizure of Gibraltar] - Warfare History Network / Charles Whiting (2006)
- [The Meeting at Hendaye: Franco, Hitler, and the Failure of Axis Expansion] - Denis Smyth, Diplomacy & Statecraft (2001)
- [Francoist Concentration Camps: Labor, Repression, and the Tefía Colony] - Carlos Hernández de Miguel, Los Campos de Concentración de Franco (2019)
- [Secret Nazi Bases: Villa Winter Episode] - Yesterday TV / American Heroes Channel (2019)
- [The Franco Regime and German Intelligence in the Canary Islands] - José María Irujo, La Lista Negra: Los Espías Nazis Protegidos por Franco y la Iglesia (2003)
- [U-Boat Operations in the Eastern Atlantic, 1941–1943] - Clay Blair, Hitler's U-Boat War: The Hunted, 1942–1945, Random House (1998)
- [Franco's Spain and the Axis Powers: Intelligence, Trade, and Strategic Ambiguity] - Wayne H. Bowen, Spain During World War II, University of Missouri Press (2006)
- [Las Noches de Tefía: Historical Context of the Franco Regime's LGBTQ+ Persecution] - Miguel del Arco / Buendía Estudios (2023)
