Figueres
"Dalí built his own mausoleum and made it funnier and stranger than anything he put on canvas."
I arrived in Figueres by train from Barcelona on a Wednesday morning in September, expecting a small provincial town with one very large attraction. The small provincial town part was accurate: the streets around the station are ordinary Catalan market-town streets, the cafes serving cortados to local workers, the Rambla running its tree-lined length through a center that moves at a pace entirely suited to itself. And then, six blocks in, you turn a corner and there it is: the Teatro-Museo Dalí, its walls the color of dried blood, topped with giant plastic eggs and golden Oscar statuettes, the whole structure crowned by a geodesic dome that reflects the sky back at itself. It is not a building that prepares you gently for what is inside.
The museum was created by Dalí himself on the ruins of the old municipal theater — bombed in the Civil War and left derelict for decades — and it is, as he described it, the largest surrealist object in the world. He designed every element: the exterior, the interior spaces, the specific works that belong in specific rooms, the placement of objects in relation to other objects, the angle of the light. The result is not a museum in the institutional sense but a total work of art in which the exhibits are embedded rather than displayed. The ceiling of the former theater’s circle is painted with a trompe l’oeil that recedes dramatically when you stand in the correct position. The Mae West Room — a furniture installation that assembles itself into a face when seen from a specific viewpoint — requires you to climb a camel-shaped ladder to a peephole, and when you look through it the effect is genuinely strange in a way that isn’t diminished by knowing it’s coming.
Dalí is buried in the crypt beneath the stage. I went down — a short flight of stairs, a velvet rope, a spotlight on a plain marble slab in the floor — and stood there for a moment among a small group of Japanese tourists who were being very quiet. The simplicity of the tomb is either the greatest straight line in the history of self-staging or genuine modesty slipping through the performance. Given everything else about the museum, I lean toward the former. He designed the space himself. He knew what he was doing.
The town itself, beyond the museum, has a pleasant unhurriedness that the attraction distracts from. The Museu de l’Empordà on the Rambla covers local history and fine arts with the slightly exhausted quality of good provincial museums everywhere, but it has genuinely fine Catalan landscape paintings and a collection of Greek and Roman amphorae found in the bay at Roses that are worth ten minutes of anyone’s time. The Rambla is a social space in the proper Catalan tradition — locals of all ages claiming the benches and the cafe terraces at hours that seem implausible to northern European minds. I had a crema catalana at four in the afternoon next to a family of four, the youngest child asleep across three chairs, the adults deep in conversation with nobody checking the time. Figueres operates at a speed that the museum distracts from, and the contrast between the surreal interior of the building and the entirely ordinary town outside is itself, perhaps, the final exhibit.
When to go: September through October offers the best combination — the light has the specific quality of Mediterranean autumn, the museum is less crowded than July and August, and the town’s weekly Thursday market fills the Rambla with stalls. Book the museum timed-entry online regardless of season; the queues without tickets are long and unpleasant.