The Dali Museum Figueres Barcelona Costa Brava

This is one of the most visited museums in Spain but is it really a museum at all? Dali, its creator, denied that it was, calling it 'a gigantic surrealist object'. Even the name theatre museum has two meanings. It is built on the ruins of an old theatre, where Dali had his first exhibition at the age of 14; but it is also a theatre because of the way we are meant to respond. Dali did not want captions, or a catalogue; he wanted the 'audience' to be free to create their own surrealist experience.

From outside the view is dominated by the transparent dome on the roof, together with Dali's trademark eggs on the facade. Once inside, you are drawn to the courtyard, with its central sculpture, Rainy Taxi, featuring a giant model of Dali's wife Gala standing on a black Cadillac. Some things you cannot miss like the Mae West room, where a sofa and two fireplaces are turned by means of a lens into a pouting face. Sooner or later you reach the crypt, where Dali is buried; Dali spent his last years in the Torre Galatea, and on his deathbed told the Mayor of Figueres he wanted to be buried in his theatre, rather than with Gala in her castle at Pubol. A separate exhibition dedicated to Dali's jewellery is now open.