Ramble
Quest - Figueres -- Screwed By The Ghost Of Dali
Using the pleasant town of Figueres as a base, I take a day trip to Empuries to see the Greco-Roman ruins on the coast. It's interesting, but not as flash as the major Roman ruins I saw in Turkey. Frustratingly, they cover up one of the largest floor mosaics with mud in winter! How tough could it be to build a small roof over this? The best part of my day trip was hiking along the coast between the cute village of Sant Marti D'Empuries and L'Escala, the nearest town with a bus. The coastal views along here are gorgeous.
Back in Figueres I visit the small but good (not as good as Castello though) L'Emporda Museum. I also hike around the Castell de San Ferran, which is billed as the largest fortress in Europe. It is deceptively large when you start to walk around it.
The big draw in Figueres is the Salvador Dali Museum, as this is his home town. I'm a Dali fan, but I'm very leary of Dali art exhibits. During my first trip to Europe, I paid to see a Dali exhibit in Italy and the art inside was just crap. Since then, I've seen and avoided countless other Dali exhibits, usually hearing bad things about them from other travelers afterwards. There are three large Dali museums in the area, but this one is the most popular. None of them have any of his major pieces, which are primarily in the States. I sprung for the nine euro admission fee fully knowing that it wouldn't be worth the price.
It may be over-priced, but it's still an interesting museum, with an eclectic collection of Dali originals, Dali inspired creations, and works of art that were owned by Dali. Dali supervised the design of the museum himself and it is a very unusual, and therefore interesting, layout. The estate is clearly milking the name for all it can get, but I still enjoyed my visit.
The Dali Museum was the only museum I saw in Spain that was crowded. The popularity of the Dali name is just amazing. A group of young Spanish children tour the place while made-up in Dali greasepaint moustaches! Another group of French teenagers curiously seem to be drawn to the very worst art pieces. I think it's great to bring school kids to art museums but I wonder at all those empty, and better, museums I've seen. Doesn't this send the message that it is far preferable for an artist to be notorious and media-savvy, rather than artfully accomplished? Don't get me wrong, I think that during his lifetime, Dali was all of these things, but he did put his name on too much crap and a lot of money is made by displaying it.
It's a bit of a shame that Figures is so over-whelmingly Dali-centric because I think it is overlooked as a nice base for exploring the surrounding countryside. It is something of a transportation hub for the region so I grab local buses (slow, infrequent, but basically reliable) to get out to the smaller, surrounding towns. Figures has plenty of cheap places to stay, which is not the case in these other towns.