Portbou - Walter Benjamin Memorial

Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin (15 July 1892 – 26 September 1940) was a German-Jewish literary critic, philosopher, social critic, translator, radio broadcaster and essayist. Combining elements of German idealism or Romanticism, Historical Materialism and Jewish mysticism, Benjamin made enduring and influential contributions to aesthetic theory and Western Marxism, and has sometimes been associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory.
Among his major works as a literary critic are essays on Goethe's novel Elective Affinities; the work of Franz Kafka and Karl Kraus; translation theory; the stories of Nikolai Leskov; the work of Marcel Proust and perhaps most significantly, the poetry of Charles Baudelaire.

Benjamin committed suicide in Portbou at the French–Spanish border while attempting to escape from the Nazis. The people he was with were told by the Spanish police that they would be deported back to France, which would have hampered Benjamin's plans to get to the United States. While staying in the Hotel de Francia, he apparently took some morphine pills and died on the night of 25/26 September 1940.

Created by Israeli artist Dani Karavanhe, the memorial to Walter Benjamin is on a clifftop by Portbou’s municipal cemetery. It was named "Passages" in remembrance of Benjamin’s final passage from France to Spain, as well as his enormous unfinished work Passagenwerk (Arcades Project) on 19th-century Paris. The name also refers to the several passages visitors make during their time at the memorial, from the journey down the steps to the glass view of the ocean whirlpool and back up to the rectangle of sunlight in the dark.

From the tunnel, there is a steep and rocky path that leads to the back of the cemetery and an ancient olive tree. Benjamin was buried in a common and unmarked grave, but further along the path there is a monument to him in the form of a square platform surrounded by flowers. The top of the cemetery has views of the azure Mediterranean water, as well as the Pyrenees, where Walter Benjamin made his final attempt to escape persecution by the Nazis.

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Port Vendres

Cadaques - Salvador Dali's House

Cadaqués is on a bay in the middle of the Cap de Creus peninsula, near Cap de Creus cape, on the Costa Brava of the Mediterranean.
Salvador Dalí often visited Cadaqués in his childhood, and later kept a home in Port Lligat, a small village on a bay next to the town.
The Port Lligat House-museum was Salvador Dalí’s only fixed abode from 1930, the place in which he normally lived and worked up till 1982 when, upon his wife's death, he took up residence at Púbol Castle.

Salvador Dalí moved to Portlligat in 1930, into a small fisherman’s hut, attracted by the landscape, the light and the isolation of the place. Taking that initial construction as a basis, he created his house little by little over the course of forty years. He himself described it “like a true biological structure [...]. Each new pulse in our life has its own new cell, a room”.
http://www.salvador-dali.org/museus/portlligat/en_index.html

The resulting form is the present labyrinthine structure which, from one point of departure, the Bear Lobby, spreads out and winds around in a succession of zones linked by narrow corridors, slight changes of level and blind passageways. Packed out with a multitude of objects and mementoes of Dalí, these zones are decorated with features that make them particularly warm: carpets, whitewash, dried flowers, velvet upholstery, antique furniture, stuffed animals, etc. Furthermore, all the rooms have windows of different shapes and proportions framing the same landscape that is a constant point of reference in Dalí’s work: the Portlligat bay.

Three different areas can be distinguished in the house: the part where the couple’s more private life was lived, on the ground floor and rooms 7 to 12; the studio, rooms 5 and 6, with numerous objects related with artistic activity; and the outside areas, room 13 and courtyards 14 and 15, designed to live a public life.

The Bear Lobby

Library

Patio

Studio