Dali House

Here, Dali’s “Cubist Self-Portrait with La Publicitat” from 1923. In April 1926, accompanied by his family, Dali — described by a friend at the time as “tight as a drum and as shiny as enameled porcelain” — made his first visits to Paris and Brussels.

In Paris he met Picasso, at his home and studio on rue de La Boetie, seen below, announcing: “I have come to see you before visiting the Louvre.” “You’re quite right,” Picasso replied. After this historic moment, Dali told an interviewer years later, he got in a taxi and asked to be shown the whorehouses of Paris, and visited “an incredible number” that night, always as a voyeur, keeping two metres away from the mademoiselles.

Back at the Barcelona academy in June, Dali refused to take his final oral exams in art theory, insisting that he knew more than his instructors, and was summarily expelled for his insolence.

In the event, another show at the Dalmau Galleries at year’s end drew warm praise, and a further exhibition was promptly arranged for January, beginning a year that would see Joan Miro visit Dali in Figueres and take him under his wing, prodding him to move to Paris. But he cautioned: “It’s going to be hard for you. Don’t talk too much and try to do some physical culture. I have a boxing instructor, and I train every evening … The important thing in life is to be stubborn.”

Granada’s Federico Garcia Lorca Park is the site of Huerta de San Vicente Museum, occupying the house where the poet spent every summer from 1926 until his death at the hands of Franco’s troops a decade later. Here he wrote “The Divan at Tamarit”, “The Gypsy Ballads” and “Blood Wedding”.

The painting here by Dali is “Martyr” from 1982, but his friend from youth wasn’t thinking about Lorca. The work is subtitled “Inspired by the Sufferings of Dali in His Illness”.

The museum is maintained by the city and the Federico Garcia Lorca Foundation as the house was when Lorca lived here, complete with his writing desk, and there is a still-life Dali gave him and a copy of “The Varicose Veins Book”, a funny treatise on childhood which they wrote and illustrated together.