A quiet Spanish beach resort with grisly war story
PUNTA Umbria, a quiet l i ttle resort on Spain’s Costa de l a Luz, is very much not the Costa del Sol. The beach has only a sprinkling of sun-worshippers – these days mostly Spanish, though as the town’s English Museum reveals, the ‘ foreigners’ began summering here back in the 1880s.
The Atlantic blows a cooling sea-breeze, and the four- star Barcelo Punta Umbria Mar, with its Italianate facade, is set amid a bank of sand dunes and meandering boardwalks.
It’s hard to imagine then that back in 1943 this idyllic spot was the scene of one of the Second World War’s most macabre episodes.
A body washed up on the sands, dressed in the uniform of a Royal Marines major, with a briefcase containing ‘Top Secret’ battle plans handcuffed to his wrist.
As Ben Macintyre tells in his book on WWII spies, Operation Mincemeat, this was an M15 ruse. The corpse was that of a homeless man, Glyndwr Michael, who had killed himself.
And the plans were false, designed to convince Hitler that the Allies were about to invade Sardinia.
General Franco’s secret police shared the plans with the Germans and, as a result, countless lives were saved when Hitler diverted his troops from Sicily – which the Allies duly invaded.
You can visit Michael’s grave in the cemetery along the coast at Huelva, next to the old British cemetery. From the 1870s, Rio Tinto zinc developed mines in the mountains nearby, along with a railway to their new port at Huelva and barrios ingleses – suburbs for their Allied workers.
Along with the mining museum there, this makes for an interesting day out.
Those expats founded Spain’s oldest golf, tennis and football clubs, and built holiday homes on stilts in the sand.
Today it’s mostly families from Seville who spend summer week- ends here. Back at the Barcelo Punta Umbria Mar, there are poolside loungers, chilled gazpacho and bucketloads of rosé. Bliss.