Cadaqués

The drive to Cadaqués is the kind of road that makes you reconsider your relationship with rental cars. Seventeen kilometers of hairpin turns through the Cap de Creus peninsula, the pavement barely wide enough for two vehicles, with the sea appearing and disappearing below through the pines and the white rock. I drove it on a Tuesday in June, white-knuckling the curves, coming around the final bend, and there it was: a bowl of whitewashed houses cascading down to a harbor ringed with fishing boats, the Cap de Creus headland dark and serrated against the blue. After that road, the stillness of the harbor felt like landing somewhere rather than arriving somewhere.

Salvador Dalí was born in Figueres but Cadaqués was where he became himself. He spent summers here from childhood, brought his surrealist friends in the twenties and thirties — García Lorca, Picasso, Buñuel — and eventually built his house at Port Lligat, a ten-minute walk around the headland from the main harbor. The house is now a museum and it is genuinely one of the best artist’s-house experiences I’ve had anywhere: small, labyrinthine, added to over decades in a way that reflects the accumulation of an obsessive mind. There is a stuffed polar bear in the entrance holding a tray. The bedroom has an enormous baroque bed. The swimming pool is shaped like a cross when seen from above. Everything seems both deliberately strange and completely inevitable, like the man who made it. You come out through the gift shop blinking in the bright light and feeling like you’ve been somewhere real.

The village without Dalí would still be exceptional. The streets are too narrow for cars and wind uphill from the harbor past ceramic-white houses with their bright window frames and iron balconies, small squares where old men sit in the shade, and the occasional gallery showing work by contemporary Catalan painters. The local art scene has been serious here since the early twentieth century and hasn’t entirely lost that seriousness even with the tourist trade. Anchovy fishing was once the economic engine of the place — you can taste that history still in the local restaurants, which serve the boquerones in a dozen preparations that all taste like the sea with different intensities. The best I had was the simplest: anchovies marinated in vinegar, served with bread and a glass of the local white wine that nobody has given a famous name yet.

At Cap de Creus itself, a twenty-minute drive further along the peninsula, the landscape reaches its logical extreme. The wind-carved rock formations look as though they were left there by a different geological era — or by a painter working in a hallucinatory state, which is of course exactly what happened. Dalí rendered these rocks and they appear, recognizable, in a dozen of his canvases. In the late afternoon, when the tramuntana has dropped and the light comes in long and golden off the water, the lighthouse at the tip casts a shadow across rocks that glow almost pink. I stayed until the light was gone and drove back in the dark, considerably less nervous about the curves than I had been on the way in.

When to go: May or early June, and September. The village in July and August fills to a point where the charm begins to cost something — the narrow streets are genuinely congested, accommodation books out months in advance, and the harbor terrace restaurants have waiting lists. In the shoulder months, Cadaqués returns to something closer to what attracted Dalí in the first place.