A magnificent

You aren’t often greeted at a museum’s entrance by a two-meter-high stuffed polar bear bedecked in mayoral-style chains and holding a hand-held photo flash in its paw. But the Salvador Dalí House isn’t your average museum. The bear and his fellow residents live in a rambling whitewashed villa that is a stone’s throw from the teal Mediterranean of Portlligat. This small, pebbly bay lies in one of the northernmost nooks of Spain’s Costa Brava, about two hours’ drive north of Barcelona and some 50 minutes from the French border at Portbou. This was where the maverick surrealist maestro, together with his wife Gala, lived and worked for much of the last half-century of his life.

Converted from what were originally a cluster of fishermen’s cottages, the house has been kept almost exactly as it was when the couple were there, and although you won’t see Dalí’s original paintings, what you do get is a real sense of his imagination and personality. Each of the surprisingly small rooms, including the artist’s studio, feature picture windows specially designed by Dalí to showcase the seascape beyond, flooding the house with the kind of intense natural light that most museums can only dream of.

“Here, Dalí found his small paradise,” my expert guide Cristina told me, switching effortlessly from Spanish to French – to accommodate the large numbers of French visitors who regularly pop over the border – to English as she answered questions from different groups.

Later, while I was walking back to the car park up a steep hill overlooking the sea and olive groves beyond the house, I overheard a child asking what kind of animal it was that was following me. I looked behind, wondering whether this was some kind of suitably surreal, jokey postscript to my museum visit, only to find a wild boar – squat, rusty-brown and mercifully tame-looking – trotting along after me. It was time to get back in the car.

I had come to Portlligat as part of my exploration of the recently launched ‘Catalan Grand Tour’. This new initiative by the Catalan Tourist Board, inspired by the Grand Tour of Europe that youthful grandees of centuries gone by would undertake, is designed to encourage visitors away from the mass tourism hotspots of Barcelona and the more popular beach resorts of the Catalan coast. Instead, the Tour aims to entice them out to the region’s varied, culturally rich and lesser-known hinterland, leading them through its Gothic cathedrals, ancient ruins, moated medieval villages, forests, valleys and volcanoes, focusing on sustainable tourism.

You could easily spend a leisurely fortnight covering the entire route, which runs in a loop from Barcelona that spans 2,119km. However, the tour has also been divided up into five more easily manageable sections. Each can comfortably be covered in three or four days depending on how much you decide to cram in, and you can take a mix-and-match approach to your itinerary, tailoring it to whatever piques your interest: be it nature, culture or gastronomy, or indeed a combination of all three.

I had started my tour the day before, on the section beginning in Figueres, a small town just over an hour’s drive north of Barcelona. Its leafy, pedestrianised Rambla boulevard, a bijou version of its more famous sister in the Catalan capital, ran like a spine through its centre amid smart boutiques, an excellent toy museum (the Toy Museum of Catalonia) and some top-notch restaurants.

Figueres’ main claim to fame is that it was Dalí’s birthplace. It is also the home of the Dalí Theatre-Museum, designed by the artist himself in the shell of a vast 19th-century theatre and opened in 1974. Inside the museum I saw a room featuring the famous Mae West ‘lips’ sofa and a collection of his drawings, paintings and studies, although the majority of his most famous works are housed in major collections elsewhere in the world. If Portlligat showed Dalí’s flamboyant eccentricity on a human scale, the Theatre-Museum proclaimed it loud and proud in Technicolor, with its giant white eggs and gold, trophy-like statues crowning a dark pink exterior like decorations on a cake.

Romans and Greeks

The next stop on my tour was Catalunya’s answer to Pompeii: the Greco-Roman ruins of Empúries, about an hour’s drive south of Cadaqués. As I drove through the lush vineyards of the wine-producing Empordá county, open fields blazed with flaming yellow rapeseed while the petrol-blue, snow-capped Pyrenees and slate-grey Montgrí mountains loomed vast and hazy in the distance.

Empúries is one of Spain’s most important archaeological sites, but its setting is at least as impressive as the ruins themselves. The calm Mediterranean peeped through pines performing arabesque-like poses to form a spectacular backdrop to the temples, villas and baths of the city.

You can certainly see why the Greeks settled here. They arrived as far back as the 6th century BC, before even the Parthenon had been built in Athens, and long before the Romans arrived – they wouldn’t get here for more than three centuries, drawn by Empúries’ prime position as a trading base on the Mediterranean. Fast forward a couple of millennia and, as the plummy tones of the English actor narrating my audio guide led me around the pillared ruins of an ancient Greek temple and the geometrically patterned mosaic floors of Roman villas, the ancient world rarely seemed more vivid.

This part of northern Catalunya remained powerful throughout the centuries that followed, and its landed nobles ruled over often sizeable domains. You can still get a sense of Catalan’s medieval past in the towns and villages that lie less than an hour’s drive from Empúries.

These places are typically wonderfully preserved and, sometimes, have even kept their old defensive moats. Towns such Peratallada, with its sandstone palacio, winding alleys and plazas, or Castelló d’Empúries, with its Gothic basilica and fascinating Medieval History Museum, can tell the story of the region just by wandering their streets.

The Grand Tour takes in many of these unsung corners. On the route back towards Barcelona, other stops include the labyrinthine back alleys, Gothic cathedral and Medieval Jewish quarter of Girona, as well as the forest walking trails of the Montseny Nature Reserve. Each has its own, often understated beauty. But that’s the point of this route: to take you on the slower, gentler road less travelled where hidden wonders lie behind the obvious headlines, journeying from the medieval majesty of fortified villages to the rarefied wilderness of Cap de Creus so beloved of Dalí. Is it surreal? Sometimes, yes. Is it magnificent? Frequently.