Casa Winter in Cofete: what we know for sure, and what we don't
If you have been to the southern tip of Fuerteventura, or have only seen pictures of the long, empty beach at Cofete, you will have noticed the white house at the foot of the mountain, with its round tower. And someone will surely have told you the story that goes with it: Nazi submarines, a secret tunnel to the sea, officers on the run heading for South America.
That story is the top layer.
Beneath it lies another one, less spine-chilling but far more accurate. It is about a German engineer who leased, and then through a company acquired, an entire peninsula, and began building a house in Cofete. The records tell us about this man. They also say a lot about the legends, above all what nothing proves.
What matters for your trip, we will say up front: Casa Winter is a private house, its ownership is still disputed today, and no authority publishes any visiting arrangements for it. Cofete lies within the Jandía Natural Park (Parque Natural de Jandía), and the road there is maintained by the Cabildo of Fuerteventura (the island government). For the beach and how to get there, see our article on the best beaches in Fuerteventura and our Fuerteventura travel guide. Here we unpack the house.
An engineer from the Black Forest
Gustav Winter was born on 10 May 1893 in Zastler, a woodcutters' village in the Black Forest. In 1912 he graduated as an electrical engineer in Freiburg, and at nineteen he went to work in Argentina. When he was sailing home in 1914, the British navy stopped his ship in the English Channel. In February 1915 he escaped, reached Vigo on a Dutch liner, and stayed in neutral Spain.
In the Canary Islands he started out in Las Palmas: between 1925 and 1928 he set up the power company CICER and, in the Guanarteme district, the Alfonso XIII power station, which was inaugurated on 12 October 1928 in the presence of Miguel Primo de Rivera, head of the Military Directorate. He sailed around the islands in his yacht, the Argo, and that is how he reached Fuerteventura. Even the sources disagree on when he first came here: according to one local history account, he first landed on Fuerteventura in the thirties, while according to his family he had already seen the coast of Jandía from the yacht in 1927.
What did he want there? In his own words, a centre for deep-sea fishing. His plan included salt pans in Morro Jable, along with a fish and fishmeal canning factory.
A peninsula he was not allowed to buy
Jandía was a peculiar place. It had been a feudal estate since 1403, which had somehow escaped the abolition of feudal estates in 1811. It covered 17,827 hectares, the largest landholding in the Canary Islands, and was owned by a family of counts living in Barcelona.
Yet Winter could not simply buy it, because the Spanish law of the time did not allow a foreigner to purchase a landed estate. The solution came in two steps. On 19 July 1937, in Burgos, the capital of rebel Spain, he signed a lease with an option to buy for 9000 pesetas a year, and on 1 October he took possession of the peninsula as tenant. In 1941 a company called Dehesa de Jandía S.A. was formed, which bought the estate and confirmed Winter's lease, option to buy included. The contract stated 250,000 pesetas; according to his son, 500,000 were actually paid. One local history work simply calls the company's Catalan founders Winter's front men.
What kind of landlord he became is told by a 1949 estate regulation: anyone who slaughtered an animal for their family had to give another one to the owner "in compensation". At Matas Blancas, a barbed-wire fence cut the peninsula off between the two coasts. This picture is less exciting than the legend, but also less pleasant, and it is just as much part of the story.
The house with no exact birthday
The most telling document is a building permit. In February 1949, an application was made in the company's name to the municipality of Pájara for permission "to rebuild a farmhouse": a single-storey building of 276.75 square metres, with five rooms and a toilet. The permit came through on 19 July 1949, when the work was already well under way. Winter then raised it to two storeys, and added the side tower that many people take for a lighthouse or a radio tower.
What came before is a matter of disagreement, and this is the most important point in this article. According to the family's own website, Winter chose the site of the house in September 1941, where a grain store had stood, and the foundations were soon begun, but work stopped in 1942 because of the war. His son's 2025 book names 1946 as the start: the master builder arrived on 30 September, and in January 1947 they were still only promising to finish the foundations. One local history account says construction began during the years of the Civil War, while the man who lives in the house today says the thirties.
The same account says that work continued between 1946 and 1950, and was never finished. The family did not live here: Winter's second wife, Isabel Althaus, declared that she would not raise a family in Cofete, so they lived in Morro Jable, and went to the house in Cofete for holidays and weekends.
The legends, as they are told
What follows are legends. We list them because this is what you will hear on the spot too:
a submarine base, with a secret tunnel leading from the basement to the sea;
a hiding place where Germans lay low after the war before travelling on to South America incognito;
Hitler and his wife, who did not die in Berlin but rested here on their way to Argentina (following a 1983 magazine article);
a secret meeting in Jandía in 1939, where Göring and Admiral Canaris supposedly designed the house;
a rest house for submarine officers, as Alberto Vázquez-Figueroa's 1999 novel embellished it.
According to an article reviewing his son's book, these stories really caught fire from the eighties onwards, after Winter's death in 1971. One tangible object feeds them too: Winter had a Krupp mine cart and rails brought over from Germany. According to one local history work, they were needed for a tunnel at Gran Valle, which would have had to be blasted through the hard basalt, but the authorities did not allow that. And so the rusty mine cart became proof of the secret tunnel.
What the archives say
The most thorough investigation was carried out by Juan José Díaz Benítez, a historian at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (ULPGC), based on Spanish and foreign archival sources. According to his freely available study, published in the journal Anuario de Estudios Atlánticos in 2018, there is no evidence in the records of the German naval command that Winter took part in supplying submarines, nor that any such operation ever took place in Jandía at all.
There is, however, one document that points in exactly the opposite direction. The German armed forces high command (OKW) complained in a letter to Göring that Winter's works on Fuerteventura were attracting the attention of enemy intelligence and endangering the secret supply network, and so asked for the works to stop and for the Germans there to leave. If Winter had been a trusted man in the network, the historian argues, it would have been enough to give him orders directly.
The real supplying went on elsewhere: between March and July 1941, six German submarines were supplied from the cargo ship Corrientes, in the port of Las Palmas, Puerto de la Luz. The U-135, sunk near Fuerteventura, went down some sixty kilometres east of the island. The study concludes that there is no trace of Fuerteventura having been a submarine base, nor does it seem plausible. One local history account adds that a boat cannot even anchor off Cofete's shallow shore with its heavy swell.
The accusation still existed, though. On a 1945 list compiled by the Allies, containing 104 German names, Winter appears as the German agent responsible for observation posts and for supplying submarines. According to the family, the Allies investigated his case but did not demand his repatriation. In 2002, the Simon Wiesenthal office stated that it had no record of Winter being a member of the Nazi party. He was granted Spanish citizenship in August 1958.
What we don't know
We do not know when construction of the house began. Four versions exist side by side: foundations in 1941, a start in 1946, the Civil War years, the thirties. The 1949 permit is a fixed point, but it only tells us that something was already being built by then.
We do not know what the basement was for. According to one local history description, eight small, almost windowless rooms open off a central corridor, and this part has been walled up for decades. The family speaks of an old grain store; according to the local historian, the rooms are more reminiscent of cells. We found no published survey of it based on measurements.
We do not know for sure where Winter spent the Second World War. The author of the local history account himself writes that the information is muddled: Germany, France and Spain all come up. Nor is it known who the "German gentlemen" were, whom the mayor of Pájara reported in 1940 as building roads and houses in Jandía. And why Jandía was left out of the 1941 defence plan for Fuerteventura is a question research has not yet answered.
Finally, we do not know exactly when the house passed to its current owner either. That is what the next section is about.
Who owns the house today
This is where the story becomes a human matter, not an archaeological one.
According to one local history work, Winter's heirs sold the shares in Dehesa de Jandía to the Gran Canaria construction company Lopesan in 1984, except for the house in Cofete. Since they could not renovate it inside a natural park, in 1999 they sold the house to Lopesan as well. A 2026 press interview says 1996. In the same interview, Pedro Fumero, who lives in the house and whose family worked here for more than fifty years, says that he does not recognise the company's ownership, claims a right of usufruct, and has filed a claim for ownership by adverse possession. He also says that, by prior arrangement, he shows visitors round a small collection he has set up himself and the basement, which he calls the bunker. No official source (Cabildo, municipality, tourist office) says anything about this possibility of visiting.
There are official rules, though, for the landscape around the house. The Jandía Natural Park was declared protected in 1987, and reclassified in 1994. The courts annulled the park's 2006 management plan, and the Cabildo is drawing up a new one. In 2025, the Canary Islands parliament drew the boundary of the village of Cofete inside the park in a separate law, and left the detailed rules to the new plan. In July 2025, according to the Cabildo, the plans were still undergoing quality review.
So if you step inside, you are entering a private house whose legal status is disputed, and what you hear inside is the story of just one of the parties involved. The family's book belongs to another party. The clearest view of both comes from the independent archival work.
What you can see if you go
You reach Cofete on the road from Morro Jable towards Punta de Jandía. According to the Cabildo, the first stretch, from the Morro Jable junction to the Cofete turn-off, is more than eleven kilometres, and from there it is roughly nine more kilometres to the village of Cofete and Casa Winter. The Cabildo maintains the road by resurfacing it with gravel (recebe). In November 2025 bad weather damaged it, and bus 111, which runs between Morro Jable, Cofete and Punta de Jandía, was also suspended until it restarted on 11 December. Before you set off, check the bus on the official Tiadhe website, and for getting around without a car, see our guagua article.
Between the village and the house you will find:
Casa Winter at the foot of the mountain, above Cofete beach, with its tower.
Casa del Arrendatario, the tenant's house in the village of Cofete, from the early nineteenth century. The tenant of the Dehesa de Jandía lived here and managed the pastures and the gathering of orchil lichen, and it also had a chapel, a sacristy and a grain store. The Cabildo restored it a decade ago.
Cofete cemetery, and the beach car park, which the Cabildo tidied up in 2024.
The Gran Valle trail, which you can also walk across to Cofete. This is where Winter wanted to dig his tunnel. The route is described on our Degollada del Gran Valle to Cofete page.
Swimming at Cofete beach is dangerous, as our article on rip currents explains. The rest of the landscape is covered on our Jandía Natural Park page, and the other branch of the road takes you to the Punta de Jandía lighthouse. If you liked the "what we know and what we don't" approach, we looked at the pyramids of Güímar the same way.
When you stand in front of the house and look down at the empty beach, what will you see in it: a secret base, a landlord's unfinished castle, or a house that reveals the most about itself through the very fact that in eighty years we have not been able to name its birthday?
Sources: Díaz Benítez, J. J.: Submarinos en Canarias durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial, Anuario de Estudios Atlánticos 65 (2018, Cabildo de Gran Canaria, ULPGC); Palacios, C.-J.: Realidad y leyenda de Gustav Winter, señor de Jandía (local history chapter, self-published by the author); Casa Winter Cofete, the Winter family website (Antecedentes); Ley 1/2025, de 3 de junio, de delimitación gráfica del asentamiento rural preexistente de Cofete (BOE); Cabildo de Fuerteventura, news (2016, 2023, 2024, 2025); Tiadhe (line 111); elDiario.es/Canarias Ahora (2025, on the book "Casa Winter Cofete"); Sol del Sur (2026, interview with Pedro Fumero).
Cover photo (cropped): Casa Winter from above, with Cofete beach and the Atlantic Ocean behind it. dronepicr, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.