Castell Gala Dali in Pubol

When Salvador and Gala Dali were in exile in Italy during the Spanish Civil War, the painter promised his wife that he would one day buy her a castle. Thirty years later, he acquired this Gothic and Renaissance castle in the village of Pubol. Dali wanted Gala to be able to get away from him, with her lovers if necessary, and insisted that he would never enter the castle without her permission.

The castle was in a state of disrepair and Dali set about recreating it. The result is a typically Daliesque mixture of the grotesque, the beautiful and the absurd. Classical statues in the garden share space with elephant figures sculpted from cement;  17^th Century tapestries hang beside trompe l'oeil painted radiators and huge Dali canvases. Everywhere you look there are portraits of Gala, and her initial G is frequently worked into the design Gala spent little time in her castle, arriving for short stays each summer but continuing to live with Dali in Port Lligat. When she died in 1982 her body was driven to Pubol and buried in the crypt with a stuffed giraffe looking on. Dali moved into her room but two years later he set fire to the bed and, despite a lifesaving operation, he was never to return to the castle. The Cadillac in which he insisted on leaving Pubol - he refused to take an ambulance - still sits in the garage. Dali left the castle to the Spanish state and it was opened to the public as a museum in 1996.