Cadaqués

Cadaqués, perched on a rocky inlet within the Cap de Creus Natural Park in the Alt Empordà comarca of northern Catalonia, is widely considered the most beautiful village on the Costa Brava. Its white-walled, flat-roofed houses — more North African than typically Catalan in character — cascade down steep hillsides to a harbor of fishing boats and pleasure craft on a pebble and rock bay. The village attracted an extraordinary concentration of artists and intellectuals in the early-mid 20th century: Picasso spent a summer here in 1910, Marcel Duchamp returned regularly in the 1920s-30s, Man Ray photographed in the area, and Federico García Lorca visited repeatedly. But the deepest connection is with Salvador Dalí, who spent most of his life at Port Lligat, a tiny settlement of fishermen's houses 1km along the coast from Cadaqués, where he assembled an ever-expanding labyrinthine studio-home over five decades. The Casa-Museu Dalí at Port Lligat, now managed by the Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation, preserves the house and studios as they were at the time of Dalí's death; entry is strictly limited and must be booked weeks in advance online. The surrounding Cap de Creus peninsula, designated as a natural park, is the easternmost point of the Pyrenees and of mainland Spain — a landscape of granite polished by wind and sea, with walking trails connecting Cadaqués to the Cap de Creus lighthouse (3 hours return) and the medieval monastery of Sant Pere de Rodes on the hillside above. No train serves Cadaqués; the access road from Roses and Figueres winds over the sierra in a series of hairpin bends.