Dali's Paradise

Few artists have had so much link and fascination for their homeland like Salvador Dali for the Empordà. By his own he recognizes the tramontane, the wind that frequently hits this Catalan region, was the responsible of his “complete madness”. In the Empordà he borned, lived, created and died. Also in this corner of the Girona province is on display great part of his legacy, in places that were witness of his life and scenarios of his inspiration. 

To understand Dali must visit Figueres, the city where he was born and in which the young Salvador spent his youth. Came to the world in 1904 in the 6^th of the Monturiol St. Years later he’d rename the place as “the geniuses’ street”. Dali was baptized in the Sant Pere church, placed in the homonymous street, two blocks from his birth house. In the same road is place the Museo del Juguete de Cataluña where, between porcelain dolls, brass cars and zoetropes, there’s a whole exposition dedicated to the toddler Dali, with many family pictures and his inseparable puppet: the teddy bear Marquina.

Near to the museum is La Rambla, in whose central cafeterias a teenage Dali spent hours drawing the life around him. In one of those, the Emporium Café, wrote years later with Luís Buñel the script of the movie Un perro andaluz (1929).

Autorretrato con Bacon Frito (1941)

Galatea de las Esferas (1952)

In his youth, Dali already made his life a constant performance and wasn’t tired of free up the extravaganza. However, the culmination of that exhibitionism came on his adulthood with the reconversion of the Figueres Theatre direct by himself turned it into the actual Dali Theatre-Museum which was, according to his words, an «absolute surrealistic object». The museum shows an unique amount of artworks and periods of the artist and includes a some of his most acclaimed paintings, among them are Autorretrato con Bacon Frito (1941) and Galatea de las Esferas (1952), in addition the sculptures, potteries, engravings, photographs, holograms and the extraordinary jewelry collection he designed since 1941 ‘til 1970.

Dali and Gala

While the artist teenage, the Dali family spent the summer in Costa Brava, in the quaint town of Cadaqués (to 35km). There Salvador had his first painting studio in a small fishermen house placed near to Port Alguer. In the years he spent in this place he received the visit of some great friends like García Lorca and Buñuel, also there he found the love of his life, Helena Ivànovna – the world would meet her as Gala – who settled in the Miramar hotel – today La Residencia – to spent the summer of 1929.

Dali embodied in paintings all the landscapes he admired the most. The stony terrain of the Costa Brava among Cadaqués and the Natural Park of Cap de Creus is discovered in paintings like Muchacha en la ventana (1925) El espectro del sexappeal (1932) or El destete del mueble alimento (1934). Another landscape features also came part of the dalinian universe. For example the espardenyes, the traditional footwear of the region that appears in some sculptures, the porrones and the panes of pages he used to introduce in his creations as allegory of «art as meal».

The road of the empordanese maestro follows the succinct fishing village of Portlligat – two kilometers from Cadaqués – where Dali and Gala moved in 1949 after his retirement in New York. His hose, today turned into a museum, get back to show that Dali not only embody the surrealism in his paintings, but in his life too. The maze architecture, the motley rooms and a kitsch deco – dissected polar bear included – were the love nest and creative workshop of the couple for more than three decades. The Casa Museo of Portlligat just opens a new expository space, the Torre de las Ollas, where Dali used to work with his sculptures and potteries.

From the couple’s fishing house in Portlligat continues now to the Empordà inner to know other spots of the Dali Route. To fifty kilometers you get to Santuari dels Àngels, high on a hill rounded by pine trees. There, betraying his exhibitionism, Gala and Dali get married on secret and with the strictest intimacy in 1958.

Theatre-Museum Dali - Figueres.

Decades later, the artist’s wife decided her retire from the public life consequently the marriage got the Púbol castle, 10 kilometers from the sanctuary, Gala moved there at the age of 76. She took care of the decoration with a look that made her remember her aristocratic Russian origin. The genius’ muse died in 1982, and after being embalmed, was buried in the castle’s crypt, dressed with a fancy Dior red dress. By her side were other crypt, at first was conceived for Dali’s grave. It left empty, because the empordanese genius decided, at the end of his days, he wanted to rest eternally in the museum of his natal Figueres and ordered to build a mausoleum in one of its rooms. There was buried in 1989, exactly 25 years ago.