Independent on Sunday, 28 January 2007
My mother had been nervous about my Spanish cycling journey from the start. It was no surprise then, when, a few weeks in, she called me on my mobile phone. "We need a holiday," she said. 'We'll meet you in Barcelona on Sunday." I was thrilled by this excuse to abandon my wearisome two-wheeler, for we were intending to drive up to the coast of northern Catalonia, to those whitewashed fishing villages, pale yellow beaches and bright turquoise coves that had provided lifelong inspiration to one of the most applauded artists of the 20th century: Salvador Dalí.
Dalí was born and raised in the inland town of Figueres where his father worked as a notary. But his family had a second home, on the coast at Cadaques, and it was there that Dalí spent his childhood summers. He loved the village with a feverish intensity and, years later, after his father expelled him from the family home in Figueres in a row about a painting in which Dalí had insulted his deceased mother, he incensed the patriarch further by buying a house in the neighbouring fishing community of Port Lligat.
The house in Port Lligat was a tiny shack but, over the years, the artist developed and redesigned the space until it became a labyrinth of extensions, winding passages and dead ends. His principal home for more than 50 years, it provided an idyllic refuge amid the vivid light, beaches and headlands that so inspired Dalí's work.
The dramatic coastline around Port Lligat and Cadaques can be seen in London later this year: from June the Tate Modern is assembling more than 100 of Dalí's works, including more than 60 paintings, in its exhibition Dalí & Film.
Dalí loved the cinema, and he expressed his cinematic vision through both his paintings and his own films. These included collaborations with Alfred Hitchcock (Dalí created the dream sequence for Spellbound) and Walt Disney, as well as one of the most talked-about movies of the last century, Un chien andalou, which Dalí co-wrote with his friend Luis Buñuel.
Dalí's and Buñuel's second cinematic collaboration, L'âge d'or, was filmed at Cape Creus, just to the north of Cadaques, and locals were employed as extras. The fishermen didn't enjoy fame for long, though. The film was considered so scandalous that, less than two weeks after its opening in Paris, the censors prohibited its screening.
My parents and I hurtled in our hire car towards the wonderland in which Dalí created so much controversy. The wild, stark landscape of the promontory on which both Cadaques and Port Lligat lie was as breathtaking that day as it had been when the painter went there as a child. It was once covered in lush vines but, in the 1880s, the Phylloxera vastatrix lousewrecked the crop. Whole swathes were never replanted; here, only the black stones of the terraces remain and cast harsh, foreboding shadows over the land.
Cadaques, too, had changed little. It was still a tiny, tranquil community whose fishermen hauled in their catch each morning; the restaurants served local hake, monkfish and Catalan wine. We took rooms with sea views at a beachside hotel. "Will the waterfront be noisy at night?" asked my father. (He suffers from a profound aversion to the sound of other people's nightlife.) The receptionist looked aghast. "Not in Cadaques," he said.
In the days that followed we pottered happily around this peaceful Spanish coast that somehow has avoided the scars of mass tourism. We drove the few kilometres to Cape Creus, whose dark rocks have been sculpted into extraordinary shapes by the winds and rains of centuries. Dalí was bewitched by these bizarre formations and they featured in his work.
On another, we made a pilgrimage to Figueres. Dalí opened his Theatre-Museum in his home town in 1974; more than 30 years later it's one of the most visited museums in Spain and its paintings, drawings, sculptures and installations are still displayed exactly as he planned them.
The museum is sensational. This final masterpiece - Dalí insisted that it should be a complete work of surrealist art in itself - was the perfect testament to this artist who had been so talented and so tempestuous, so brilliant and yet so indisputably barmy.
We wandered through the sculpted loaves and suspended wooden chairs; studied the portraits of Gala; explored the famous Face of Mae West Which Can Be Used as an Apartment, and admired the intricate drawings. We tiptoed past Dalí's tomb within which his embalmed body lies, treated to resist decay for 200 years. We gazed at his old Cadillac, which turned heads when he imported it from the US in 1948 and now stands as installation art in the garden.
And then, enchanted and slightly unsettled, we went back to our hire car, a Fiat Punto. Compared with the transportations of Salvador Dalí, it seemed the tiniest bit banal.
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