Salvador Dalí at Home: Tour the Surrealist’s Whimsical World in 15 Photos

The painter’s Mediterranean home was an art project in itself, with façade niches that whistled in the wind, stuffed swans, and larger-than-life eggs stationed throughout the property

Salvador Dalí, the Spanish surrealist best known for the melting clocks in his painting The Persistence of Memory, had two real loves: his wife, Gala, whom he married in 1934, and his home on the Port Lligat bay in Cadaqués, Spain. Gala was married to French poet Paul Éluard when she first met Dalí in Cadaqués and left her husband to start a life with the Catalan artist. She handled much of the business side of Dalí’s art and was his most enduring muse. Their offbeat Port Lligat dwelling, where the couple first lived in 1930, became a common inspiration for Dalí’s work. He maintained ownership of the residence for the rest of his life. “With the capriciousness which always characterizes my decisions,” he wrote about buying the property, “it became in a moment the only spot where I would, where I could, live.”

Dalí, a highly divisive character described by writer George Orwell as both “a disgusting human being” and an artist with “exceptional gifts,” helped shape the surrealist movement of the 1930s. It’s unsurprising, then, that his home had its own surreal bent, from the construction to the decor. Read on for a peek inside the artist’s strange abode.

black and white photo of Salvador Dali standing to left and Gala Dalí seated in front of bookshelves at home

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Parisian pad

Fleeing the Spanish Civil War, Dalí and Gala moved from Port Lligat to Paris in 1936. In this photo, taken the following year, they are pictured in front of a well-stocked bookshelf in a corner of their Paris home. The couple relocated to the US at the outset of World War II and stayed in the States until 1948, when they returned to Port Lligat. They would remain in the Spanish locale throughout the warmer seasons for the rest of their lives. In the colder months, they stayed for a stint in the hotel Le Meurice in Paris and then at the St. Regis in New York before traveling back home.

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St. Regis suite life

This snapshot, taken sometime in the 1950s, shows the artist in his St. Regis suite alongside a portrait that he painted of fellow artist Pablo Picasso, whom he first met in 1926. Dalí, who stayed in room 1610 of the grand Manhattan hotel each year, clearly had a soft spot for Picasso—though his love for Gala, of course, trumped all: “I love her more than my mother, more than my father, more than Picasso, and even more than money,” he once wrote.

Photo: Charles Hewitt/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

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At home in Port Lligat

In 1930, Dalí used an advance that he received for the painting The Old Age of William Tell to purchase a run-down fisherman’s hut in Port Lligat. “Our little house was to consist of a room of about four square metres that was to serve as a dining room, bedroom, studio and an entrance hall,” he wrote in his 1942 autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí. “You go up some steps and as you land, three doors open out, taking you to a shower, a toilet and a kitchen of very tight dimensions that you can hardly squeeze in. I wanted it all good and small—the smaller the more womblike.” The structure, which was previously used to store fishing equipment, became the first part of the artist’s ever-evolving residence on the seaside plot. In this 1955 image, Dalí is shown leaping on one of the abode’s rooftop terraces.

Photo: Charles Hewitt/Getty Images

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The artist’s muse

Dalí poses with a topless Gala as she looks out at the sea from their Port Lligat garden in 1955. The artist was obsessed with his wife and the surrounding landscape; both were often depicted in his work. “All of my pictures are drawn with Gala’s blood,” Dalí, who sometimes signed his paintings with his wife’s name next to his, once said. Of the place that inspired so much of his work, he said, “I am home only here; elsewhere I am camping out.”

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Where time slows down

In this 1955 photo, the painter holds up a depiction of a melting clock–similar to those featured in The Persistence of Memory, his best-known work—at home in Port Lligat. Perhaps the secluded setting, where, according to Dalí, time slowed down, was an inspiration for the 1931 work. “Port Lligat is the place of production, the ideal place for my work,” he said. “Everything fits to make it so: Time goes more slowly and each hour has its proper dimension. There is a geological peacefulness: It is a unique planetary case.” The majority of the dwelling’s furniture was secondhand, picked out by Gala, which might explain the feminine, floral-printed piece in the bottom right corner—a departure from the surrealist artist’s more eccentric design sensibilities.

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Expanding the estate

Dalí sits near a fireplace in his living room in this 1959 photo. Though he never had kids, a stuffed lamb and a child-size chair, pictured here, were among the strange furnishings in the artist’s living room. As the years went by, he expanded the Port Lligat estate through the purchase of surrounding huts, which he would connect to the main plot—a process that Dalí likened to the multiplying cells of a biological structure. The resulting residence was a labyrinthine complex of stairs, hallways, and oddly shaped nooks and crannies.

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In the bedroom

Dalí curls the ends of his famous mustache in the villa’s primary bedroom in 1959. The stylish space was furnished with an animal print armchair, a decorative tri-panel screen, and two twin beds in red-and-powder-blue bedding with matching drapery serving as a grand headboard of sorts. Dual bathrooms and a dressing room decorated with personal photos—mostly of Dalí and his famous compatriots—rounded out the suite.

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A musical home

Donning a traditional Catalan hat, Dalí leans against a tower in the garden at his Port Lligat home in this 1961 snapshot. The artist designed the tower’s exterior with holes and protrusions so that it whistled when a strong wind blew. Two-pronged forks extended from the structure, reminiscent of the crutches that recurred in Dalí’s paintings, such as The Enigma of William Tell and Soft Self-Portrait with Grilled Bacon.

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Stark façade

The villa’s exterior, as seen in this 1961 photo, was a bright white that stood out from the gray rocky landscape. The patios, paved with locally sourced slate, were lined with cypresses and silver olive trees. According to architect Oscar Tusquets Blanca, who was a longtime friend of the artist, Dalí credited Gala for the “beautiful restraint” of the outdoor areas of their home, “thanks to [her] radical opposition to him contaminating it with his crazy antics.”

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Bringing the Mediterranean inside

In this 1961 image, Dalí poses inside a room in Port Lligat decorated with an elaborate candelabra, starfish, and other sea life. The artist drew inspiration from the elements of the Mediterranean locale when it came to decorating his home, which featured taxidermic sea swans that he plucked off the beach.

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Framing the bay

As seen in this 1963 snap, all of the windows at Dalí’s home framed his beloved Port Lligat bay. According to Tusquets Blanca, the artist kept a window open to watch the sun every morning and claimed, since he lived on the eastern end of the continent, that he was the first Spaniard to see it rise each morning.

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A surrealist’s garden

Larger-than-life eggs, which were also a common symbol in Dalí’s artwork, were sprinkled throughout the exterior spaces at Port Lligat, where Dalí is seen here talking to journalists in 1968. The artist’s garden, designed for entertaining, reportedly had hidden areas with peepholes so that he could spy on his company.

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Seaside siesta

Dalí lounges by another egg sculpture in his garden in 1968. According to the biography The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí, the famed painter took an hour off each day for lunch and a siesta—but otherwise worked on his art all day, with the exception of Sundays.

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In the studio

Dalí stands next to a painting in his second-floor art studio in this 1969 shot. A special pulley system allowed the artist to raise and lower his large-scale paintings through a crack in the floor so that he could adjust which section of the work was within his reach.

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Final years at Port Lligat

In this 1980 photo, Dalí poses with a palette in his Port Lligat home. That year, a major retrospective of Dalí’s work was exhibited at London’s Tate Gallery. After Gala died in 1982, the artist left Port Lligat to live and work at Castle of Púbol, where Gala’s crypt was located. He largely retreated from public life until his 1989 death at the age of 84.