About 2.8 million people have visited the house Salvador Dali from Portlligat of its conversion into a house museum, now twenty-five years ago. According to the forecasts of the Gala Dalí Foundation, the space, the only permanent residence of Salvador Dalí and Gala, will reach the figure of 3 million visits during the 2024-2025 season. It receives around 115,000 visitors annually, since it must be taken into account that due to the characteristics of the site, the capacity is limited.
Since its opening in 1998 it has generated close to 23 million euros in box office revenue and, although the visitors started out mostly Catalan, little by little the French gained space until they reached 43%. One in three visitors to Portlligat had previously been to the Figueres Theatre-Museum.
Regarding the investments that have been made in the space, from the rehabilitation to the present day, the president of the Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation, Jordi Mercader, details that they rise to 2.3 million euros. These investments, which began when the Ministry of Culture transferred its use to the Dalí Foundation in 1993, have allowed to progressively open visiting spaces. In these years, it has gone from the initial 522 square meters – at first only the interior rooms, the Patio de les Talles and the pool were visited – to the current 4,468, which allow the visiting public to get an idea of what Salvador Dalí’s only stable workshop was like, the space where he lived with Gala for fifty-two years -combining it with stays abroad- and the landscape of Cap de Creus, so present in his work.
Mercader also emphasizes the relevance of the Portlligat Collection, made up of 3,000 objects of a great variety that allow us to better understand the way Dalí lived and worked, from works created by the artist to work tools, furniture or clothing, to the painter’s personal library, consisting of 4,300 books that are preserved currently at the Center for Dalinian Studies, in Figueres.
Commemorative exhibition
To commemorate the quarter century of opening as a museum space, Portlligat hosts the photographic exhibition until September 30 Dali and Gala. the inhabited housea route that starts in the bay of Portlligat, in front of the facade of the house, and ends at the top of the Olivar, where there is the garage used by the Dalís.
Conceived by the director of the Dalí Museums, together with Rosa Maria Maurell and Maria Carreras, head of documentation at the Dalí Foundation and member of the Center for Dalinian Studies, respectively, the exhibition includes nineteen photographs of the Dalís in different outdoor spaces in Portlligat, taken between 1930 and 1980.
The snapshots of Batlles-Compte, Meli, Juan Gyenes, Oriol Maspons, Pietro Pascuttini, Carlos Pérez de Rozas, Ricardo Sans and Robert Whitaker testify, according to the Dalí Foundation, “the atmosphere that existed in that place when Dalí and Gala were there they lived: an inhabited house, also sometimes a scenography, and above all a workshophe Holy of Holies of the artist”.
Each image is accompanied by a QR code that gives access to audios in which Dalí’s words about the unique universe of Portllig are reproducedat The voices are from Jordi Boixaderas, Rob Paterson and Eric Bonicatto.
The fisherman’s hut of Lídia de Cadaqués
Expelled from the family, the young Salvador Dalí acquires Lídia Noguer, Lídia de Cadaqués, a fisherman’s hut in the bay of Portlligat, to install there. Little by little, Dalí and Gala they reform and expand the constructionto satisfy their creative needs, until turning Portlligat into the workshop where the best works of the surrealist era come out. For half a century, Dalí and Gala lived and worked in the house, until with her death in June 1982, it was closed under lock and key.