Dalí’s house in Portlligat - a fisherman’s hut that grew for forty years
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Portlligat, Cadaqués · 1930–1982
Salvador Dalí’s house in Portlligat never had a single plan. It began as one fisherman’s hut on a small bay just north of Cadaqués and grew, room by room, for forty years. Dalí compared it to a living thing: “Each new impulse in our life had its own new cell, its room.”
In 1930 Portlligat was some twenty huts lined up on both sides of a stream, reached on foot by the cemetery path or by sea. Dalí knew the coast from the summers of his childhood at Es Llané in Cadaqués, but in 1929 he fell out with his father over Gala, and the couple needed a place of their own. Lídia Noguer, a Cadaqués fishseller who believed she was the heroine of Eugeni d’Ors’s novel La Ben Plantada, sold them the hut where her two sons kept their fishing gear. The foundation that runs the house-museum dates the purchase to 20 August 1930; the Catalan heritage inventory gives 1929. It was paid for with money from the Viscount of Noailles for the painting The Old Age of William Tell. The hut measured some 22 square metres and had no electricity. Dalí later said it was there that he learned to live with little and to sharpen his thinking.
A second hut followed in September 1930, rebuilt in 1932 with a small annex that now links the rooms. In 1935 the builder Emili Puignau added two more: the first studio, now called the Yellow Room, and a bedroom, now the Birds’ Room. Then the Civil War broke out. Dalí and Gala left Portlligat, and from 1940 to 1948 they lived in the United States; in 1944 the painter Josep Maria Prim moved into the empty house with his family.
The house took its final shape after their return. In 1948 they bought the plot of the olive grove and the Ca l’Arsenio hut, which became the library and living room; the library furniture was made by the Cadaqués carpenter Joan Vehí. The next year three more huts became a bedroom, a kitchen and rooms for the household staff. The studio on the upper floor was finished in the spring of 1950. It faces north for the best light, as Leonardo advised, and has two windows: one onto the bay and the island of Sa Farnera, one onto the slopes behind. Dalí designed its doorway himself, in the shape of a truncated triangle. He painted there at an easel and at a mechanical stretcher that raised and lowered large canvases - The Battle of Tetuan and The Apotheosis of the Dollar around 1965, the ceiling panels for the Palace of the Wind in his museum at Figueres around 1972.
From then on the house grew outwards. A pigeon loft went up in the olive grove around 1954. In 1958 a path of white limestone, the “Milky Way”, was laid along the sea, and around 1960 came the courtyard, its walls built to close the place to outsiders. The Oval Room - almost a hemisphere, after a design Dalí had made in 1957 for a nightclub in Acapulco - was finished in the summer of 1961, the summer dining room in 1963, and the pool, planned from 1969, in the summer of 1971. Dalí went on changing its details afterwards; its pavilion, the foundation notes, he designed from polystyrene packaging.
In the studio: brushes and bottles on a small table, a print of Velázquez’s Las Meninas on the wall. The pigeon loft in the olive grove, built around 1954, with a white egg on top; the bay beyond. In the courtyard: a large white egg in an arched niche, whitewashed stone walls and steps. The pool, finished in 1971: swans spouting water, white rocks, a pavilion under a ruffled canopy.
Inside, the house is a labyrinth. The rooms run into one another through narrow passages, small changes of level and dead ends, starting from the entrance hall, named after the stuffed bear that stands in it. The windows come in every shape and size, and each one frames the bay. Gala furnished the rooms with antiques from dealers in Olot and La Bisbal; the rest is esparto matting, whitewash, dried flowers and velvet. The writer Josep Pla remarked that the house looked more like Dalí every day.
Gala died in 1982. Dalí moved to the castle of Púbol and did not return to Portlligat; he died in 1989, leaving his estate to the Spanish State. From 1994 the architects Oriol Clos and José Ramos adapted the house for visitors, and it opened as a house-museum in 1997, the year Catalonia declared it a monument of national interest. Some 3,000 objects are shown as they stood between Gala’s death and Dalí’s.
Sources: Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí: Salvador Dalí House-Museum, The Dalinian Triangle, museum map, press dossier for the 25th anniversary of the house-museum (2023); T. Moner, “Lídia de Cadaqués, Eugeni d’Ors and Salvador Dalí” (2002); M. Aguer, “The Portlligat Studio and the Others” (2013); Inventari del Patrimoni Arquitectònic de Catalunya, Casa Salvador Dalí de Portlligat; Gran Enciclopèdia Catalana, “Portlligat”; El Temps, 3 November 1997; Real Decreto 185/1989 (BOE). Photographs: MYT’; Norbert Font i Sagué, about 1910, Arxiu Fotogràfic Centre Excursionista de Catalunya.
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