Captain Alan Hugh Hillgarth CMG OBE (1899–1978) was a British adventure novelist and member of the intelligence services, perhaps best known for his activities in Spain during and after the Spanish Civil War.
[1] Hillgarth appears as one of the actual historical figures in C. J. Sansom's 2006 novel, Winter in Madrid, and also in María Dueñas's 2009 novel, El tiempo entre costuras (English translation 2011, The Time in Between (US), The Seamstress (UK)), as well its Spanish-language 2013 television adaptation.
[3][4] Hillgarth was educated at the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, and during World War I he saw active service as a midshipman before being seriously wounded during a skirmish in the Dardanelles.
By the outbreak of World War II, Hillgarth was Naval Attaché in Madrid, where he handled a huge number of clandestine intelligence operations on behalf of the British government.
A number of British adventurers set forth on a romantic enterprise with modern machinery to excavate a treasure believed to amount to more than 12 million pounds.