You aren’t often greeted at a museum’s entrance by a two-meter-high stuffed polar bear bedecked in mayoral-style chains and holding a hand-held photo flash in its paw. But the Salvador Dalí House isn’t your average museum. The bear and his fellow residents live in a rambling whitewashed villa that is a stone’s throw from the teal Mediterranean of Portlligat. This small, pebbly bay lies in one of the northernmost nooks of Spain’s Costa Brava, about two hours’ drive north of Barcelona and some 50 minutes from the French border at Portbou. This was where the maverick surrealist maestro, together with his wife Gala, lived and worked for much of the last half-century of his life.
Converted from what were originally a cluster of fishermen’s cottages, the house has been kept almost exactly as it was when the couple were there, and although you won’t see Dalí’s original paintings, what you do get is a real sense of his imagination and personality. Each of the surprisingly small rooms, including the artist’s studio, feature picture windows specially designed by Dalí to showcase the seascape beyond, flooding the house with the kind of intense natural light that most museums can only dream of.
“Here, Dalí found his small paradise,” my expert guide Cristina told me, switching effortlessly from Spanish to French — to accommodate the large numbers of French visitors who regularly pop over the border — to English as she answered questions from different groups.
Later, while I was walking back to the car park up a steep hill overlooking the sea and olive groves beyond the house, I overheard a child asking what kind of animal it was that was following me. I looked behind, wondering whether this was some kind of suitably surreal, jokey postscript to my museum
