Dalí's Figueres: from the Palmera to the Theatre-Museum: a self-guided walk
By Alleytale
Dalí's hometown, ending at the Theatre-Museu
Figueres shaped Dalí before he made it famous: the house of his birth, his school, the toys of his childhood and the church of his baptism, with Narcís Monturiol, the submarine inventor, as the town's other great son.
The stops
Plaça de la Palmera, together with Carrer de la Concepció and Plaça del Gra, forms an ensemble protected as a good of local cultural interest, with modernist, eclectic and noucentista buildings. The Caixa de Pensions building facing the square held the town's new public library, inaugurated in 1951 with a lecture hall. Before the monument to Narcís Monturiol went up on the Rambla, this square had been talked of as its site.
Photo: Enfo — CC BY-SA 3.0 This cultural and recreational society was founded on 24 January 1856, and its present premises date from 1904. Its Golden Book carries dedications from the Nobel laureate Frederic Mistral, who first performed the ritual of signing it, and from Francesc Macià, Lluís Companys and Josep Tarradellas, among many others. In 2004 it received the Creu de Sant Jordi for its long record of promoting art, culture and social life.
Photo: Francesc Vernet López — CC BY-SA 4.0 Salvador Dalí was born on 11 May 1904 on the first floor of a house on Carrer Monturiol, the Casa de Puig. It was designed by Josep Azemar, a modernist architect born in Figueres who was the town's municipal architect from 1899 to 1914. Nine months before Dalí's birth his older brother, also named Salvador, had died, and at five he was told that he was that brother's reincarnation, which he came to believe.
Photo: PaliGol — CC BY-SA 3.0 The museum's collections go back to 1885, when the Institut Ramon Muntaner received seven works on deposit from the Prado so that fine-arts students could work from great paintings. The Town Council created the museum in December 1946, and the present building, on the site of a modernist farming-chamber building by Josep Azemar, was inaugurated in 1971, with a façade of reliefs by the sculptor Frederic Marès. Its collection brings together Catalan art and the painters of the Empordà, Dalí among them.
Photo: PaliGol (talk) — CC BY-SA 3.0 Narcís Monturiol was born in Figueres in 1819 and invented the first air-independent, engine-driven submarine. This limestone monument at the lower end of the Rambla, inaugurated on 2 May 1918, has a high relief on its pedestal framing his portrait and a bronze female figure holding olive leaves. His first submarine, Ictíneo I, made its first dive in Barcelona harbour in September 1859.
Photo: Grondin — CC BY-SA 3.0 Father Julián González de Soto founded this school in 1839, and it is the oldest public lay secondary school in Spain. It occupies a former Franciscan convent and is built around a cloister. Salvador Dalí took his bachillerato here and worked on the school magazine Studium.
Photo: Enfo — CC BY-SA 3.0 The Toy Museum of Catalonia opened in 1982 in the former Hotel París, once the family house of the Baron of Terrades, planned in 1767 by Pere M. Cermeño, the engineer who built the Castell de Sant Ferran. It grew from the collection of the toy collector Josep Maria Joan i Rosa and now shows more than 4,000 pieces. Some of the toys belonged to well-known people, among them Anna Maria and Salvador Dalí, Federico García Lorca and Joan Miró.
Photo: Enfo — CC BY-SA 3.0 This square was planned as a whole in 1819 as a market place, around an arcade that already stood along one side. The streets leaving it keep the names of the towns they lead to: Peralada, la Jonquera, Besalú and Girona. The town hall at its centre was declared ruinous in 1926 and rebuilt in 1940.
Photo: Enfo — CC BY-SA 3.0 The church is first mentioned in 1020, and the medieval core of Figueres was built around it. It suffered heavy destruction in the Spanish Civil War and was rebuilt between 1941 and 1948, with the crossing crowned by an octagonal dome. Salvador Dalí was baptised here and his funeral was held here, a link recalled by a work made for the church's thousand-year anniversary, Agnus Dei - My Name Is Salvador.
Photo: Enfo — CC BY-SA 3.0 The heart of the museum is the town's old theatre, which Dalí knew as a child and where one of the first public exhibitions of his art was shown. The theatre burned in the Spanish Civil War, and in 1960 Dalí and the mayor decided to rebuild it as a museum for the town's most famous son; it opened on 28 September 1974. Dalí is buried in a crypt below the old stage, under a glass geodesic dome.
Photo: Jordiferrer — CC BY-SA 4.0
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