A television series can move millions of people, win international awards, and at the same time leave us with a version of the past that doesn’t quite match the documents. That is the starting point of this piece: not the suspicion of a conspiracy, but a concrete question about how fiction shapes what we believe we know — and how memory is defended by going to the sources instead of the rumor.
The case is “Nights in Tefía” (in Spanish, “Las noches de Tefía”), the 2023 Atresplayer series directed by Miguel del Arco, inspired by Miguel Ángel Sosa Machín’s novel “Viaje al centro de la infamia.” It recreates the Colonia Agrícola Penitenciaria de Tefía, in Fuerteventura, and the persecution of homosexuals under Franco, and it won a GLAAD Media Award and a MIPCOM Diversity Award. It is a powerful work. But it is, by its own admission, a dramatization: alongside the prison it places “El Tindaya,” a pure-fantasy music hall imagined by the inmates. And a dramatization is not a documentary.
Why “it’s only a series” isn’t enough
The distinction is not a quibble. When a historical film contradicts what is documented, we tend to remember the screen version as if it were the fact. In a study by Butler, Zaromb, Lyle, and Roediger (2009), people who had read a historically accurate text and then watched a clip that contradicted it “recalled” the film’s false information as often as half the time. And a general warning — “careful, it’s only a film” — wasn’t enough to protect them: only a specific warning, one that flagged the exact error, worked. In other words: saying “it’s fiction” protects no one. You need to know where, exactly, the fiction departs from the sources.
What the records say
Let’s start with what is solid, because it has to be acknowledged without discount. The 15 July 1954 amendment to the Ley de Vagos y Maleantes — a law of Republican origin, from 1933, which the Franco regime hardened — introduced homosexuality as a “dangerous state.” From then on a man could be interned not for a crime committed, but for the mere fact of being homosexual. This is documented by the person who studied the case files: Guillermo Portilla Contreras, professor of criminal law and author of “El infierno penal de los homosexuales durante el franquismo”, reconstructs from the Las Palmas Provincial Archive a precise machinery: typically two years of imprisonment, then two years of internal exile (“destierro”), and finally “government delegates” who, on the pretext of finding them work, followed them and warned employers that they had been convicted. A persecution, in the full sense of the word. That is not in dispute, and no criticism of the series can erase it.
It is worth adding two clarifications, also documented, that popular accounts tend to skip. They come from Víctor M. Ramírez, an LGBT memory researcher, in his work “The Myths and Realities of Tefía.” First: the colony was established in January 1954 to handle “vagrants and malefactors” in general — that is, before the law included homosexuality in July. It was not founded as a prison for homosexuals. Second: according to the case files, homosexuals were a minority. Of the roughly 300 to 350 inmates who passed through Tefía over twelve years, about twenty were there for their sexual dissidence; the rest were “social dangers” of various categories, common prisoners, and a few political prisoners. “A prison only for gay men” is, literally, inaccurate.
What the witnesses of Tefía say
Here the fieldwork of Gabriel Capitán comes in. He interviewed people who knew the colony firsthand; his interviews are collected on his channel (in Spanish), and they return a daily reality very different from the televised one.
Isidro Vera Moreno, a 93-year-old neighbor of Tefía, remembers prisoners who fetched water from the wells, who played soccer with the village boys, who went to Mass in the same truck as the officials; asked directly about mistreatment or hunger, he answers carefully: in front of him, he didn’t see it; there was one “harder” official, but he saw no beatings. Pedro Carreño, well versed in the history of Fuerteventura, describes a place with no fences and no armed guards, a kind of “semi-freedom”: the inmates helped neighboring families, worked the few plots of land, went to the bars on weekends. Marisa Segura, daughter of the first administrator, and her husband Martiniano Martín — a prison officer who arrived in 1963 — speak of a coexistence “like family”: no shaved heads or uniforms (the inmates wore their own clothes), real beds, a soccer team mixing inmates, officials, and villagers, and the stone-breaking limited to a few morning hours. They also cite a highly respected figure on the island, the physician Don Arístides, who in their account found no mistreatment. For those who lived there in those years, the idea of a “concentration camp” is simply unrecognizable.
Why these accounts don’t contradict as much as they seem
One might ask how all this squares with the accounts of horror. The answer is chronological more than ideological, and the sources themselves provide it.
The harshest testimonies come not from journalists but from two homosexual former inmates, Juan Curbelo and Octavio García, collected by the historian Miguel Ángel Sosa. They describe forced labor, beatings, and severe hunger, and memory researchers consider them credible. But — and this is the decisive point — Octavio García himself notes that this brutal regime did not last for the whole life of the colony: the early years, under the first director, were the cruelest; later, conditions changed. Víctor Ramírez records the same nuance. And Gabriel’s witnesses describe precisely those later years: Martiniano Martín explicitly speaks of 1963-66, when the colony was emptying out and only a handful of inmates remained.
In other words: a colony that lasted twelve years was not always the same. Someone imprisoned in the early years and someone who worked there at the end may, in good faith, have seen two different Tefías. This is not a contradiction to be resolved in favor of one side; it is the history of a place that changed over time. And there is a limit of perspective worth stating plainly: neighbors and officials saw the colony’s external, daytime life; what happened inside — and the very legal reason for the internment, being confined for being homosexual — was not visible from the village.
Where the legend and the fiction outrun the facts
Against that background, some things now in circulation genuinely deserve to be scaled back, and it is healthy to say so:
- The label “concentration camp,” applied wholesale to the entire history of Tefía, goes beyond what the sources support: it was not an extermination camp, and for much of its existence daily life was, in many respects, the one the local witnesses describe.
- The forced labor — the stone-breaking — applied to all inmates: it was the sentence of that prison, not a cruelty aimed specifically at homosexuals.
- Portilla himself, who examined the case files, holds that the “aversion therapies” sometimes mentioned were not applied in the prisons or the agricultural colonies: it is a claim that spread online without support in any case file.
Two different histories that memory confuses
There is also a confusion that deserves its own chapter, because it is the perfect example of how collective memory fuses distinct facts. In the same 1940s, and on the same island — but more than a decade before the colony — the 91st Disciplinary Battalion of Penalized Worker-Soldiers operated: young men who had fought in the Republican army during the civil war and who, once it ended, were forced into a “military service” of hard labor. They reached the Canary Islands in September 1941 and left in early 1943; one of the three companies was sent to Fuerteventura, and historians at the University of La Laguna single it out as the worst off, with deaths from deprivation and brutal conditions. That battalion built roads and runways — perhaps including, around 1941, the airfield strip that only in 1952 passed to the Ministry of Justice, to become, shortly after, the penal colony.
These are two completely different things: Republican political prisoners in the early 1940s on one side, and Vagos y Maleantes inmates between 1954 and 1966 on the other. And yet, over the decades, popular memory has overlaid them, attributing to the colony episodes of brutality that belong to the battalion. Gabriel Capitán himself underscores it in his work: the two must not be confused. It is an observation that cuts both ways — it reminds us that Franco-era repression in Fuerteventura was real and at times brutal, but for a different group and in a different era — and for that very reason it is a good antidote against the confusion.
The honest point, in both directions
The conclusion is not to choose one absolute version. “Nothing ever happened in Tefía” does not hold: it is contradicted by the two former inmates whose testimonies historians consider credible and, above all, by the underlying fact that no witness denies — men were interned, exiled from their homeland, and persecuted afterward as well, for the sole fact of being homosexual. That, in itself, is violence, however mild the colony’s daytime life may have been.
At the same time, neither does the most lurid version hold as incontrovertible fact for the entire history of the place. Portilla himself, who documents the persecution, observes that the victims complain of “degrading treatment” more than of torture in the strict sense, and that the worst abuses occurred in the common prisons rather than in the agricultural colonies. The honest truth holds three things at once: a real and documented legal persecution; living conditions that varied greatly over time, harsh at first and more open later; and a set of exaggerations and confusions that have grown over the years around the case.
Why this concerns your mind
Tefía is an almost textbook case of how collective memory forms. There is a real and serious historical fact; there are different testimonies depending on the period and the vantage point; there are distinct episodes that memory tends to fuse; there are false details circulating online; and there is, above all, an emotionally powerful fiction that many end up remembering as fact. When a dramatization is taken for a documentary — especially if it enters classrooms as “history” — it can replace a complex event with a simplified, one-directional version. That is how what an entire generation believes it knows gets shaped: not by a single deception, but by a story repeated until it seems obvious. It is the same field of forces we describe when we talk about the Intersubjective Mental Matrix, and it touches closely on our perception of reality.
This is not about defending ourselves from a hidden enemy, but about learning to tell the novel from the chronicle, the testimony from the document, the proven from what is merely well told — and to keep them apart even when the history, like Tefía’s, is uncomfortable in more than one direction. In the next episode we look at the techniques of psychological manipulation that narratives use to convince us; later, at how collective memory can be protected.
