Casa De Salvador Dali

Port  Lligatt, Spain

A Stuffed, snarling polar bear covered in jewellery, giant plaster eggs and a swimming pool shaped like a penis: It must have been interesting for guests who visited Salvador Dali’s house during the decades he lived there. The renowned surrealist artist bought a collection of small fisherman’s houses in Cadaques during the 1930’s and gradually combined and enlarged them into a structure  resembling Wonderland, with warrens of small rooms filled with unlikely objects and winding terraced gardens.

Nothing at Dali’s is to be taken at first glance. Everything has a story. The three stuffed swans leering down on the library from a shelf, those belonged to Dali as pets and would swim around in the bay in front of Port Lligat. Upset that he could not see them at night, Dali fitted candles mounted on small helmets to their heads and would sit with his wife, Gala and watch the small yellow lights float past his house.  

Likewise, his narrow swimming pool turns out to be crafted in the form of a giant misshaped phallus, surely a thoroughly unsettling addition to any garden though at Dali’s it does not seem out of context among the giant, misty-eyed snakes and empty thrones that adorn the giant veranda, and where the king and queen of this surrealist kingdom used to sit before their court. Though both Dali and Gala have been dead for many years, this place lingers on, full of their eccentricities and a strange and unsettling energy that is hard to explain. Over the years I have visited Dali’s house many times, taking groups of friends and relatives and acting as a de-facto tour guide through the cool streets and dusty roads that lead up through the town and into the countryside to Port Lligat, and yet never am I completely comfortable there.

I could put the above feelings of unease down to the obvious bizarreness and insanity that is basically daubed upon the walls down to those staring black-and-white eyes of his that look out from dozens of photographs around the house. Certainly, it is hard not to feel shivers down ones spine when walking past a giant plastic couch shaped like a pair of luscious lips, or that silent stuffed polar-bear standing guard by the door.

Maybe though, it is that I find Dali not an amusing and eccentric buffoon with a talent for painting as I feel he tries to portray himself but rather a sinister creature who’s perversities were window-dressed enough that he has gained a cult status around the world. His sexual deviancies (which were many) led him to lust over very young men and women and photograph them naked in his garden. Watching a documentary about this recently, I found myself hearing Dali’s drawn-out, deep voice for the first time and seeing his strange face with its blank-eyed leer in a series of short videos. For me, seeing his lurching mannerisms as he droned huskily on about strange, senseless subjects I formed a deep dislike for the man.

That I think Dali was by all accounts a twisted pervert does not mean that I don’t harbour a certain cautious admiration for his work and indeed his house. The tacky shock value in everything he creates, from the décor of the rooms he lived in to his most famous works in all their strange glory, it is hard to explain but the effects work and do not look half as bizarre as one would expect. One can look at said art work and is confronted by a painting of Christ that when you stand back turns into the face of Abe Lincoln, or strange drawings of melting clocks and elephants with stick legs and recoils instinctively but at the same time something draws you in, compulsively. At his house, the same effect is created in each bizarre room, and always, as I walk home in the evening it leaves me slightly confused.

The Famed Penis Shaped Swimming Pool

The area Dali used to shoot many of his pictures involving young men

A member of the very relaxed Catalan security

Hay Tools and Dovecot combined

A sculpture above the entrance to a folly, Dali's garden

Dali and Gala's beds (a series of mirrors reflected the sunlight towards them in the mornings) where they slept separately 

Statue, Dali's Studio

One of the windows in Dali's studio, looking out to the bay

A half finished Dali, sitting in his studio

The Chair Dali painted from when he became too elderly to stand and work

A Window to the Beach

Bridge to America from Spain, a symbol Dali saw himself as

Two of the pet swans Dali had stuffed

Charlotte and the stuffed bear in the coatroom

Owl in the coatroom

The guardian bear in the coatroom that Dali took from France on a train, paying a ticket for his furry accomplice 

The outside of the Dali House at midday

Two Lovers? Statues on Dali's wall that can be seen from the road, or possibly sea