Isidre kept laughing as we wound through the narrow streets of Cadaqués, kept waving and calling out to almost every person we passed with a greeting that sounded like déu, god. A policeman, a construction worker, a fisherman — todos se conocen in this little seaside town, he told me, talking to me in patient Spanish I was surprised to learn I could actually keep up with.
Moments after I plunged myself waist-deep into the chilly Mediterranean for the first time at the main beach in Cadaqués, Punta de Sa Costa
Tucked in Spain’s easternmost peninsula just shy of the French border, Cadaqués is accessible from Barcelona via a two-hour, 24-euro bus trip whose final leg takes you through a stunning mountain pass — a ride serpentine enough to make even the strongest of stomach turn green, but so brainshatteringly beautiful it doesn’t matter.
I’d made the trek specifically to see Dalí’s home in the neighboring village of Port Lligat, where he’d lived and worked the majority of his years. And to be sure, visiting that space — and furtively popping an olive from one of his grove’s trees in my mouth, so green it made me grimace — was incredible, but it was far from the best thing I found there.
Cadaqués, early morning, October 2017
I guess this is the part where I admit I haven’t actually fallen in love with Barcelona.
I always thought I wanted to live in a big city, to spend every day writing and wistfully watching passers-by from my shoebox apartment. I was deeply enamored with the idea of commuting by metro.
Maybe I haven’t found the right city yet; maybe I outgrew the desire. But I think it might also be possible that the city life I’m imagining doesn’t really exist anymore. Everything’s priced out of reach, crammed with tourists, and not-so-slowly succumbing to gentrification. Last I heard, die-hard Portlanders are moving to Boise, for god’s sake, and surely even Idaho won’t ultimately evade modern-day Americana’s kombucha-and-Anthropologie clutches.
Don’t get me wrong: Barcelona has so much to offer, and I’ve discovered more than my fair share of joy here. And it’s not as if the entire Cap de Creus peninsula isn’t replete with tourism — the pedestrian map of town even shared the same font as the one in St. Augustine. Maybe, in the end, there are only a few types of places, different iterations of the same theme: beach towns, metropoleis, the stacked safeguards of suburbs.
But Cadaqués, whose clear, clean water broke my heart; Cadaqués, where an off-duty waitress grabbed me by the arm to gush over my tattoo and also — I use this word as generously as possible; she was unforgettably sweet — to drag me over to show her boyfriend. She was the one who urged me to go up to Cap de Creus, saying it was “truly magic” (so many of the best people I’ve met talk unironically about magic), and she was already making plans for my return when I revealed I’d only be there for two nights. We spoke in a mish-mash of half-languages after she exhausted all the possible fluency options: “Do you speak German? French? Italian?” She was the first person to ever call me out for my American accent.
Cadaqués, where I listened to the chef in a deserted restaurant help her son with his homework while I ate what she’d just made in silence; after, the boy approached me and asked me if I had a daughter because a girl in his class looks just like me, as if I’d been preceded to this place by my ghost. Cadaqués, where I watched the sun rise at the edge of the world and, for the first time in years, sat there long after it was full-bore in the sky, not wanting to be anywhere else. Where I found, if only briefly, whatever it is I always seem to be looking for.
The first of many, many photos I took of town, this one out the passenger window of Isidre’s Jeep — which he stopped for me to facilitate
A spray of color climbing the walls of Cadaqués storefront
The door of the Ermita de Sant Baldiri Church, built in 1703, stands open in the early morning
A two-fisting replica of the State of Liberty is decorated with independence movement paraphernalia
Pre-dawn light over the harbor
My sunrise spot
After walking the entire boundary of town in search of the perfect sunrise, I found a footpath back to Port Lligat and Dalí’s house — which proved to be more challenging than I expected
The path broke onto this deserted, hidden beach…
…continued along the cove…
… and abruptly ended. I had to clamber hand and foot over the sharp-looking upcrops of rock you see in the left of this frame, which ran almost all the way until Dalí’s compound. A kind of break-the-rules pre-encounter with his home before my later ticketed visit, which I think the man himself would have approved of
Olive trees and the horizon at the base of the climb to Cap de Creus
The whole path up is studded with these little coves where people boated and bathed — yes, fully naked, and yes, as Adam-and-Eve perfect as even this far-off photo suggests
Well worth the seven kilometers
Sweaty and developing a sunburn at the end of the world in Cap de Creus. The two-hour hike up had me literally scrambling a few times, including a 500-meter stretch at the end where I lost the path and basically climbed the final peak like a ladder. I’d exhausted myself too wholly to hope to make the return trip on foot as planned, finding myself stuck like a cat up a tree — until Isidre, who was totally not obligated to do so and incredibly generous to even offer, came and picked me up when the local cab service wouldn’t answer. He brought three friends, two dogs, and insisted on buying us all a round at the restaurant there at the top before we set off, crammed in the backseat together and negotiating off-color jokes in Spanglish
After my second night in Cadaqués, I hopped on the bus to check out the Dalí Theatre-Museum in Figueres, his actual hometown. The structure itself is considered the “largest object of surrealism in the world” and is an absolute carnival of his works, as well as his final resting place. As you may have noticed, I didn’t get the chance to photograph the inside of his home in Port Lligat; I’d left my phone in my bag, which I was required to check for the visit. But it was so powerful to be able to recognize the view out of his studio window in the works I saw here the next day, to have stood in the same room where he’d created many of them. Also, for all the desertion I met in Cadaqués, the Figueres museum was absolutely packed, and I spent a decent amount of time storming around, giving side-eye to the people who slowly flowed en masse — rather like sewage — by so many pieces, to all appearances completely unaffected. They let their children run wild and chatted about lunch plans and seemed not even to see what they were looking at, except for as long as it took to snap a photo of every. single. piece. It struck me as a total lack of regard and a waste of precious space, and it pissed me off, but then I wondered… wouldn’t that be exactly what Dalí would have wanted? Isn’t his work Vaudeville all the way? Isn’t art its best, its most effective, when immediate and accessible and, in some sense, mundane? Also, the experience of viewing his works in this overcrowded situation was its own education — the way we all globulously bump elbows and step on each others’ toes; how we see our own reflection in the glass over the work’s surface. Perhaps all of it is exactly by design
In the latter days of his career, Dalí began to sign his works with his wife Gala’s name — which is only one telling detail of their infamously super-charged relationship. In a room filled almost solely with portraits of Gala, I couldn’t help but cry; in her painted eyes, you can see her seeing him worship her
It says a lot about the kind of week I had — i.e., a really fucking awesome one — that my Monday trip up to Montjuïc to explore the castle and see a Lorde/Khalid concert didn’t even make the cut for a mention
The watchtower at Castell de Montjuïc
I didn’t know there was only one
As for the concert itself, it was a mixed bag; both Lorde and Khalid are fantastic but the audience was young and, in a lot of cases, obnoxious — talking loudly during the show, flipping ponytails into surrounding audience members’ faces, yelling during quiet moments, and never, not ever, putting away the ubiquitous sea of smart phones that rendered the show itself into a thousand tiny screens instead of one reality. Khalid opened with “American Teen,” which made for an interesting moment of reflection for this American who found herself outside of her country and palpably out of touch with her own teenagerdom, which is rapidly disappearing in the rearview anyway
One more shot of Cadaqués, the newest of my seaside towns, these little clutches of noise and light and life against the water’s darkness