Casa Museu Dalí, Portlligat

The Casa Museu Dalí at Portlligat, a ten-minute walk around the bay from Cadaqués, is the most personal of the three Dalí museums in Catalonia. This was where he actually lived and worked, and the house retains the accumulated oddities of a long creative life: unusual furniture, taxidermy, mirrors positioned to capture specific views of the Cap de Creus headland, a swimming pool shaped like a telephone receiver.

Visits are by guided tour only and must be booked in advance — in summer, spaces fill weeks ahead. The tour takes you through the interconnected rooms and terraced garden with views over the cove at Portlligat. The house explains the paintings more directly than any biography: the lunar landscape of Cap de Creus appears again and again in his canvases, and seeing the source changes how you look at the work.

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A story
Dalí lived at Portlligat almost continuously from 1930 until his wife Gala's death in 1982. He bought the original fisherman's hut in 1930 and spent decades expanding it room by room until the compound had grown into a labyrinthine cluster of whitewashed structures connected by narrow passages and unexpected patios. The house still contains the giant stuffed polar bear that Gala used as a coat rack, the bed from which Dalí could see the sea without sitting up, and the egg-topped studio where he worked for fifty years.

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