Immersing myself into the surreal world of Salvador Dali

My friend Lauren and I decided to make a pilgrimage to Figueres to learn more about Salvador Dali. And as we expected it was surreal, beautiful, and inspiring. Figueres is pretty close to Barcelona, so we took a train from Madrid to Barcelona, and then another train to Figueres. The town of Figueres is generally best known for the Salvador Dali Theater and Museum, which Dali designed and conceptualized himself. The outside of the building was topped with golden eggs, and on the walls were...golden loaves of bread? Poo? It was rather curious. The museum was really grand and open, except the galleries were on the sides of the building and often narrow and disorienting to navigate. It felt very Daliesque. As we roamed the galleries, I began to see Dali's inspiration coming from where he lived in Port Lligat. There were lots of paintings of rocks, plus Dali made the piles of rocks resemble nude figures. Dali’s house is right by the sea, and we drove there from Figueres on a winding road that offered stunning views of the ocean.

Dali and Gala had steadily bought a series of fisherman's huts and combined them into one big house. Numerous curious things were on display, including a lot of taxidermy of birds and bears. There was a room that served as Dali's studio, with easels and ways to display large canvases. I couldn't really begin to describe in words how curious and intriguing his house was, from the bedroom to the circular room for lounging that allowed you to hear every word and echo that emanated from it. Outside, there was a phallic-shaped pool and more taxidermy, plus faux snakes. There was even an egg that you could crawl into and pop out of.

After lunch in Cadaques, the neighboring seaside town where most things were closed in December, we decided to check out Gala's castle in Pubol. The castle is from the 11th century and was the most isolated and hardest to reach out of all the places we went to in relation to Dali. The town was very quiet, pretty much abandoned, except for a ceramic artist with a beautiful studio inside one of the medieval buildings. The feral cats pretty much had free reign of the town.

Gala's castle was very quiet. There didn't seem to be any other visitors besides the two of us, and you could tell the guard and the two women sitting at the reception area were incredibly bored. It turned out that Gala was buried underneath the castle, fitting because this was the place that Dali promised he would only come to visit with her permission. And yes, Dali designed the Chupa Chups logo, those lollipops are everywhere in Spain…and that is probably for another post.