Less than two kilometres north of Cadaqués, the road descends to a small, almost perfectly circular bay sheltered by islets and ringed by mountains. Here, among fishing boats and circling hawks, lies Port Lligat the place Salvador Dalí chose to live and work for decades alongside his muse and lifelong companion, Gala. Their house, a labyrinthine and surrealist construction that grew over fifty years from the accumulation and transformation of fishermen’s huts, is today one of the most original and fascinating museums in the world.
The views from the surroundings of Port Lligat over the bay and the mountains of the Cap de Creus are the very landscapes that inspired the backgrounds of so many of Dalí’s paintings: those schist rocks, that hard clean light of the Empordà midday, that unsettling stillness of the sea’s surface. To walk along the shore of Port Lligat, to gaze at the boats, the islets and the mountains that Dalí painted hundreds of times, is in some sense to step inside one of his canvases.
The natural viewpoint above the bay of Port Lligat, from the paths that climb the surrounding hillsides, offers one of the most poetic perspectives of the entire route: the white, whimsical mass of Dalí’s house with its giant eggs on the roof, the quiet bay at its feet, and the Cap de Creus headland beyond. A landscape that is simultaneously a work of art and a living reality.