They may not care for Franco, but thanks to him, the city wasn’t occupied by the Nazis during WWII.
Franco kept Spain from going communist and he kept Spain out of WWII for the most part, disappointing Hitler greatly.
Whether Franco expected King Juan Carlos to accelerate Spain’s progress toward democracy after his death is debatable, but the country was a far better place for his victory in 1939.
Sure weren’t any Muslim invaders in Spain while Franco was in power. Guess he thought seven hundred years of Moorish occupation was enough. That fact seems to have been forgotten by today’s Spaniards who get more worked up over Gibraltar than they do over the Muslim threat.
Ostensibly they were an ally but Franco was pretty savvy in staying out of the fray. If they had been a full fledged Axis combatant it could have changed the Mediterranean theater significantly. They kept the Germans supplied with tungsten during the war.