SALVADOR DALÍ HOUSE MUSEUM
WEBSITE: WWW.SALVADOR-DALI.ORG
LOCATION: PORT LLIGAT, 17488 CADAQUÉS, GIRONA
NEAREST AIRPORTS: GIRONA AIRPORT, 1 HOUR 25 MINUTES DRIVE
He said he was born of an egg. His wife Gala too. Dalí, or Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, 1st Marquess of Dalí de Púbol to use his full title, was the most important Surrealist painter to emerge from Spain, and perhaps the world, in the 20th century. His superior technical skill coupled with his striking image making have secured him a seat in the Pantheon of great artists.
Highly attuned to his image, everything Dalí did was steeped in Drama. Ostentation. Flamboyance. His portraits are instantly recognisable, and not just for the moustache but also the outfits and a stare to compete with any YouTube lemur. To strip away some of the bravado, however, reveals a man who was undoubtably brilliant, but also a dedicated and loving husband, and a man who lived as he worked, with honesty and love of his country. You might not see that in his camembert inspired melting clocks, but you will if you visit Casa Dalí.
Cadaqués, where Casa Dalí is based, is a small isolated town on the Costa Brava, isolated for the natural mountainous border surrounding it. Arriving to Cadaqués is somewhat of a pilgrimage of its own down steeply curved roads or, alternatively, one can arrive by boat, neither option idea for the travel weary. But when you do arrive, you will find a sophisticated, bohemian town with good restaurants and a buzz with intellectual speak. It was and is a town favoured and much visited by artists of note such as Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, and Richard Hamilton. Cadaqués is also mentioned in the story "Tramontana" by Gabriel García Márquez.
Just beyond the hill of Cadaqués is a private bay called Portlligat where Dalí first bought one small fisherman’s house, slowly adding the neighbouring houses to make the one villa that is now known as Casa Dalí. He renovated and decorated the house with the intention of living life to its fullest and entertaining his guests in Surreal style. It is almost exactly as he left it, and leave it he did when, after 53 years of marriage, his beloved wife Gala died. He was so in love with her that he couldn’t stand the thought of being in the house without her so he just didn’t return.
It is touching to think that he had amassed a whole existence, with art, meticulously assembled objects, libraries, round rooms, orchards and swimming pools, all of which suddenly became disposable without Gala. He even left his studio which he brilliantly engineered so that if working on a large canvass, he could drop the frame below the floor and continue working at eye level without the use of a ladder. Ingenious indeed.
Snooping around the house is a great way to find out more about the artist and how he lived. It is easy to imagine being at his home in a roaring party sipping cocktails and swimming in the sea. He would sit on the beach in the morning and boast to be the spaniard to receive the first rays of sunlight in the morning being in the most eastern point of Spain (not quite, but we wont hold it against him).
Dalí was not born in Cadaqués but in Figueres, a 45 minutes drive away. The industrious Mayor of Figueres approached Dalí before his death to ask its most famous citizen to donate a work. Dalí said he wont give him a work, he will give him an entire museum. And so Dalí put Figueres on the ‘places to visit’ map of Spain. And with almost 2 million visitors a year, it is the third most visited museum after the Prado and Reina Sofia. Considering those are both in Madrid where the population is almost 7 million inhabitants in comparison with Figueres which has just under 50,000 inhabitants, that is a remarkable feat. Now that is Surreal.