An insight into
Dalí's
life and work
When in a roadtrip during January 2022, I visited the three most important places in the personal life of one of the main Spanish painter, icon of Surrealism: Salvador Dalí. The artist, born and raised in Girona, left a very particular and curious heritage for us to visit. I tried to capture this unusual experience as unique as I saw it. Hope you enjoy it as well!
Teatre-Museu de Figueres
Dalí was born in the town of Figueres, where he started to develop his interest for arts. Later, when he had already become an international figure, he would come back to his hometown, finding the old local theatre a place of inspiration. He bought the building and restructured it as his museum, where he placed most of his artwork.
Casa-Museu de Portlligat
However, the place where Dalí felt like home was the house he shared with the love of his life: Gala, in the fishermen village of Portlligat. It firstly was a tiny, old cottage the painter, when a teenager, rented from an old lady he later befriended. Nevertheless, when the woman's time came, he inherited the site and started to rebuild and expand what would later become a huge and peculiar mansion by the sea.
Dalí used to say he was the first continental Spanish person to watch the sunrise, since the chamber he shared with his wife, Gala, is located at the easternmost point of the Iberian Peninsula. Therefore, he placed a mirror right next to the bedroom's window.
Castillo de Gala Dalí de Púbol
Once the marriage's glory days in Portlligat had already come to an end, Gala passed away. Dalí, unable to remain at home, surrounded by his late beloved wife's memories, left the house and never came back.
He spent his last years living alone at a medieval castle he had bought for Gala in Púbol, a small town 62 km (38 miles) away from the coast.
The artist had his wife buried at the crypt of the castle, and he never left her side until he died the 23rd January, 1989.
As Dalí had been working on his museum in Figueres all those years, the mayor of the city decided to bury him there against the late wishes of the painter, who wanted to join Gala at the castle in Púbol.
That's why, at the moment. both Gala and Salvador Dalí rest alone at two of the most significant places of his life.
Claudia B.
