Figueres: a city devoted to Dalí

The story goes that the Figueres Dalí The­atre-Mu­seum came to be after the city’s mayor Ramon Guardi­ola asked Sal­vador Dalí for art­works so he could open a room bear­ing his name in the Em­pordà Mu­seum. Ini­tially the artist gave an am­bigu­ous an­swer, but some time later when vis­ited by his friend Melitó Casals (known as Meli), the pho­tog­ra­pher who cap­tured many mo­ments of the painter’s life, Dalí told him that a sin­gle room was not enough and that he wanted a whole mu­seum for him­self.

From there arose the idea of restor­ing the Prin­ci­pal The­atre, which had been burned by Franco’s troops. It was cho­sen by Dalí for sev­eral rea­sons: be­cause he con­sid­ered him­self a the­atri­cal painter, be­cause the build­ing was in front of the church where he was bap­tised, and be­cause one of the rooms in the the­atre had hosted his first ex­hi­bi­tion, pre­sented to­gether with the local artists Josep Bon­aterra and Josep Mon­to­riol.

The build­ing, which Dalí him­self de­clared “a mu­seum that lives an earthly re­al­ity, but under the dome is kept the amaz­ing world of sur­re­al­ism”, changed the cul­tural mood of a city in which the itin­er­ary called the Route of Ants today passes by the most unique spaces of Figueres linked to Dalí.

It is a two-way pro­posal that can start ei­ther at Nº 6 (today Nº 20) Mon­tu­riol Street, where the artist was born, or at the other end of the itin­er­ary, at the The­atre-Mu­seum. Be­tween those two points is to be found the house where the Dalí fam­ily went to live in 1912, the Ram­bla – the city’s nerve cen­tre where Dalí would walk, talk, and spend time in the As­to­ria café and in the Canet book­shop – and the Em­pordà Mu­seum, which, along with a very good col­lec­tion of works by local artists, also fea­tures Dalí’s Sant Narcís paint­ing (1962).

An­other stop is the Toy Mu­seum of Cat­alo­nia, housed in the old Paris Hotel, where there is a space ded­i­cated to the child­hood and ado­les­cence of the artist in the form of toys, school notes and pho­tographs, as well as Don Osito Mar­quina, his soft toy chris­tened by the poet Fed­erico Gar­cia Lorca. Mean­while, the church of Sant Pere is where Dalí was bap­tised and where his fu­neral was held, a solid, gothic and im­pos­ing build­ing that stands out on the city’s sky­line.