Port Lligat is a small fisherman’s bay in Catalonia. It’s the Eastern-most point in Spain, and early-rising inhabitants are the first people in the country to see daylight. It’s quiet, difficult to access, and isolated - exactly how the Surrealist painter Salvador Dalí liked it.
We are staying in a small hotel in L’Escala and our tour guide drives us for an hour and a half along a winding mountain road. We are brought up over a range of hills that were terraced by Roman slaves. Nobody lives here. Somewhere in these hills is a monastery, and somewhere there’s an observatory that used to be a military base.
Unlike most tourist attractions, Port Lligat is quiet. The bay is calm and mirror-like, exactly as it appears in some of Dalí’s paintings. The beach is lined with little wooden fishing boats.The location of Dalí’s house is remote, tickets must be reserved far in advance, and only eight visitors are allowed inside at a time.
As soon as we step inside the narrow doorway of the house, we are greeted by a taxidermy polar bear, which seems to function as an umbrella stand. There is also a couch in the shape of lips underneath a window with a view of the water outside. It’s no surprise to find the house is full of Surrealist objects like posed mannequins, a stool with fawn legs, and more taxidermy animals.
The most impressive thing about the house is how every part of it is curated by Dalí for artistic convenience. The art studio takes up three rooms - at least a third of the house. Each room has a different level of light and a different aesthetic. The dark room looks like the inside of a circus tent, with an incense holder hanging from the ceiling. The middle room has abundant natural light and a mechanism to move the canvas around as Dalí painted it. The third room is at the top of a short staircase. We aren’t allowed to go up there, but if you peer up towards the top of the stairs you can see three mannequins lurking in a corner.
The best part of the entire house is the outdoor pool - suspiciously phallic-shaped in my opinion - in which Dalí and his wife Gala could escape from the heat of the Spanish sun. Fountains spew water into the pool, which is surrounded by gigantic fake snakes and, for some reason, the Michelin marshmallow man. There is also another lounge chair shaped like lips and a taxidermy lion. Because, why not? The water temperature of the pool is perfect. It seems criminal for it to no longer be in use, surely Dalí would have wanted it to be enjoyed after his death.
In the olive grove beside the house there is a pile of rubbish, which Dalí shaped into a humanoid figure with splayed arms and named “the Christ of the Rubbish.” The figure is gigantic, its rib cage is made from the skeleton of a boat hull. We loiter by the junk pile for a while and watch a snake slither up the figure’s leg.
It’s fascinating to see how Dalí’s life in Port Lligat influenced his art - most obviously in the giant painting titled “The Madonna of Port Lligat.” The view of the bay from Dalí’s house is the background of the painting. Gala is the model for the Madonna, and a boy from the nearby village of Cadaquez (which we visit later that afternoon) is the model for Jesus. The painting even includes a single white egg. The egg can also be found on Dalí’s veranda, overlooking the bay of Port Lligat.
“The Madonna of Port Lligat”: https://www.dalipaintings.com/the-madonna-of-port-lligat.jsp
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