Cadaqués

Carcassone

Mid-afternoon we arrived in the medieval fortress city of Carcasonne.  Our hotel, a fifteen-minute walk outside the old, double-walled cité, was a walkup with lumpy, rolling, funhouse floors, but it was clean, cheap, and well-located, and the owners were congenial, offering us one of their 2 free parking spaces.  Crossing L’Aude on the Pont Vieux we could see the massive crenellated walls stretching out to the right and left and imagine knights jousting before them.  It’s wonderful how, in Europe, you can travel in time as well as in space.  The vista mixed the romance of Sleeping Beauty castles with a reminder of how brutal life once was.  The rest of the day we wandered the streets and battlements, buying tee shirts for friends and a leather handbag for Frieda.  After dark, spooky torch-like lighting gave the place an eerie atmosphere, towering walls loomed out of black shadows.  We had a cassoulet for dinner, the local specialty, and then got lost trying to find our way out, stumbling into half-playful moments of trepidation as we imagined some knave or varlet lurking in the opaque shadows between the splashes of yellow light.    

 

It was a bright blue morning as we set off toward Perpignon, eventually exiting the toll highway at La Boubou and making our way on 2-lane roads through rolling vineyards toward Collioure, a resort on the coast once a hangout of the Fauve artists.  From there, we drove south.  The scenery was stunning but I had to keep my eyes on the narrow, twisty road.  Frieda was navigating and told me to stop in Banyuls Sur Mer, a seaside town about 10k. north of the Spanish border, where we had crepes at a place on the beach.  

A couple hours later we pulled into Cadaqués, a whitewashed town built into jagged black rocks and surrounded by mountains that, for me, carries a flavor of Greece.  I first visited it, briefly, in 1998 when Frieda, whose parents were born in Spain, was giving me the Grand Tour.   Her father was from Figueres, a town about 35k. inland that was also the birthplace of Dalí.  Her grandfather was Dalí’s drawing teacher, and her father and Dalí were childhood chums.  Much later, when she was a child, her family visited and Dalí, who was living in Cadaqués at the time, (or, more precisely, in Port Lligat, a kilometer away) sent a car to bring them to his house.  She still remembers how frightened she was by the huge (to an 8-year-old) stuffed bear looming just inside the front door, and her unease about the very odd man who was giving her a tour of his unusual home.  We returned in 2000 for a longer visit, exploring Dalí’s museum in Figueres (the definitive Dalí experience), as well as Gala’s Castle in Pubol.  We stayed in Cadaqués for 2 weeks on that trip, also exploring the little towns south to Tossa de Mar.  We even toyed with the idea of buying a pied-à-terre there.  Spain was still on the peseta then and everything was cheap.  But in the end we decided against it because we would’ve felt obligated to return every year and there were too many other places we wanted to go.  So instead we picked up a print of Dalí’s 1924 painting of a beach in Cadaqués, “Port Alguer,” and put it over our mantle. 

Port Alguer, 1924

We soon discovered that, aside from a favorite gelateria, everything we remembered was still there. In those days we had stayed at Playa Sol, and every morning after breakfast had gone for a swim from the little beach right in front of it. After drying in the sun, we’d walk down to the main town beach for beer and anchovy-stuffed olives and some chatting and people watching. When the olives couldn’t stave off hunger any longer, we’d walk back along the shore to our favorite restaurant, Ix!, for some paella, mussels in red sauce, or some other delectable comestible, before returning to the hotel for siesta. Toward evening we’d go for a stroll around town, maybe pausing for espressos, eventually stopping somewhere for tapas. All our favored haunts were still there. The only difference was more people; the town didn’t seem as laid back and sleepy as it once was. This impression was reinforced at a tapas place near the main beach where the road in front of the outdoor patio, unlike the old days, now swarmed with people. I tried the delicious navajas, a long, narrow clam, for the first time, and we also had some old favorites, like pimientos del patron, sardines, and bacala fritters.

Port Alguer, 2013

In the morning we picked up our old routine, heading for the beach nearest our hotel, which happened to be Port Alguer.  The beaches in Cadaqués are dark and pebbly, and the water is a dark, emerald green, but clear.  At first cold, it soon felt refreshing, and I was thrilled to swim in the Mediterranean again, a sea so full of history, the sea of Homer and Odysseus, the birthplace, cradle, and playpen of Western Civilization.  We dried in the sun before heading to the main beach for beer and olives, and on to Ix!.  The next day we varied the routine with a stroll over to Dali’s house after lunch.  It was closed so we couldn’t retour it, but the enchanted walk through the olive groves charmed us and reminded me again of Greece.  After siesta I bought Frieda a black leather vest.  

The following morning we took off for Barcelona via the main highway.  Frieda did an amazing job of navigating, better than a GPS, weaving through the city to our hotel at the top of La Rambla without a hitch.  I parked in a red zone while she registered and sent the bellhop out to take our luggage, and then she directed me to the Avis office near the Avenida Diagonal through a bewilderment of one-way streets.  We pulled into their garage at 12:59 and they slammed the door behind us for siesta.  From there we walked down Paseo de Gracia toward our hotel.  I marched past Casa Milá, but it jumped out of my peripheral vision.  That and Casa Batlló, a little farther along, are hard to miss, they’re both so startlingly unique.  We’d toured the first and seen the other Gaudí sights in 2000, when we were in Barcelona for nearly a week.  At the hotel we sampled the 24-hour buffet, taking the booty up to our room to eat on the balcony over La Rambla and watch the hordes of people swarming for Fiesta de la Merce.  

 

Cadaqués

 

We’d already noticed that people on La Rambla looked shabbier than they had on our last visit and on the way to dinner at Els Quatre Gats we noted homeless folk sleeping on door sills.  These were the first symptoms of the recession we’d seen; we hadn’t noticed it in Basque country.  Our waiter at the restaurant, who was Chilean, told us Spain hadn’t lived up to his hopes and he was thinking of going home.  Nevertheless, the restaurant, not cheap, was jammed, with no vacant tables. 

In the dim morning light we caught a bus at La Plaza de Catalunya and watched Barcelona slowly unpeel from its windows as it shuttled us out to Terminal 1.  It was hard to believe that in about 18 hours we would be 6,000 miles away and these buildings, these streets, indeed all that we had seen on this trip, would be just a dream.