Dalí Museum, Figueres: Tickets, Hours and What to Expect

The Dalí Theatre-Museum in Figueres charges €18.50 (about $22, £16) for general admission booked online and €20.50 (about $24, £18) at the ticket desk, and it opens Tuesday to Sunday for most of the year and every day in July and August. Salvador Dalí designed the building himself on the ruins of the town’s burnt-out municipal theatre, filled it with more than 1,500 of his own pieces, and is buried in a crypt under its dome. Allow about two hours, and book a time slot before you travel.

My parents took my brother and me to the south of France when I was a kid, and because my dad is a Dalí fan we drove down to Figueres for the museum. Only we never got in. It was blistering hot, the queue ran round the building, and my parents were not going to stand in it with two children. Buying tickets online in advance still sounded futuristic then.

Top tip: Avoid the lines and get a skip-the-line ticket beforehand.

A second attempt at visiting the Dalí Museum, Spain

The second attempt worked because we turned up 20 minutes before opening. There was already a queue, and it still only took five minutes to get in once the doors opened, which is the single most useful thing I can tell you about visiting in summer.

I was disorientated straight away. Arrows and numbers show you which way to go through the rooms, but the route starts in a corridor circling the central courtyard, we missed the arrows, and we set off the wrong way. Look for the numbering before you commit to a direction.

The museum is crammed. There are more than 1,500 works here, running from paintings and drawings to sculpture, engraving, stereoscopic work, installations, holograms and photography. It can feel chaotic, and it is difficult not to suspect that was the point. Dalí never explained his imagination, and walking through this labyrinth of rooms is closer to being led round the inside of his head than to visiting a gallery.

Not everything is shown well. Most of the work on the upper levels hangs in the corridors, but some pieces sit in small, dark niches where the lighting makes them genuinely hard to see.

Background info

The museum exists because Dalí was asked for a painting and offered a building instead. In the 1960s the mayor of Figueres asked him, as the town’s most famous artist, to donate a piece to the municipal museum. Dalí replied that he would not give one work but an entire museum, and he wanted it built on the ruins of the old Figueres municipal theatre, with the space where the audience had stood left open to the sky as a courtyard. It opened in 1974.

The Theatre-Museum is the centrepiece of the Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, which Dalí set up with Gala, his wife, muse and business manager. The pair collected as well as painted, so other artists appear on the walls too. Dalí also asked that a floor be given to the work of his friend Antoni Pitxot, who went on to direct the Theatre-Museum and serve as vice-president of the Foundation until his death in 2015.

The building is itself the exhibit. The Foundation calls it the largest surrealist object in the world, and from the street it looks like a fortress that lost an argument: castle-like walls topped with rows of giant eggs, a glass geodesic dome above them, and a facade covered in what look like dimples until you get close and see they are cast in the shape of bread rolls. Dalí is buried in a crypt beneath that dome, under what used to be the theatre’s stage.

Mae West room

The Mae West Room is a whole room built to look like a face when you view it from the right spot. Dalí was preoccupied with Mae West, the American actress and film star, and she runs through his work from the 1930s onwards, including the picture that reimagines her face as a room and the sofa shaped like her lips. The room turns those flat images into a walk-in installation, with the sofa as the mouth, and there is a viewing platform that lines the whole thing up.

Salvador Dalí jewellery collection

The jewellery is part of the same ticket, in rooms 23 and 24, so you do not need to book it separately. Dalí Joies holds 39 gold and gemstone pieces from the Owen Cheatham Collection plus 27 drawings and paintings he made as designs for them, which is the interesting part: you see the sketch and the finished object side by side. The rooms are darker and quieter than the rest of the museum, and there is a mirrored stairway on the way in.

The works you will and will not find here

The melting clocks are not here. The Persistence of Memory belongs to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and several of the canvases most people picture when they think of Dalí are in collections outside Spain. I left slightly disappointed for exactly that reason, and it was my own fault for not checking the collection before going.

What is here is the work that makes the trip worth it anyway. Galatea of the Spheres, his 1952 portrait of Gala assembled from floating spheres, hangs in the museum. So do Rainy Taxi, the Cadillac in the courtyard with rain falling inside it, the Mae West Room, and the Palace of the Winds ceiling, which you have to lie back to look at properly. Two hours covered it comfortably for us.

Practical information

Buy online, arrive early, and count on about two hours inside. Advance tickets are cheaper than the desk, and the museum sells timed slots, so the queue that beat us as children is now avoidable.

Tickets and opening hours

General admission costs €18.50 (about $22, £16) online and €20.50 (about $24, £18) at the ticket desk. Reduced admission is €15 (about $18, £13) online and €17 (about $20, £15) at the desk, and children go free below the Foundation’s age limit. Summer night openings are ticketed separately at around €22 (about $26, £19), or about €27 (about $32, £24) with a guided tour.

Opening hours change five times a year, which is the detail most guides get wrong. In broad terms the museum opens Tuesday to Sunday from 10:30 to 18:00 in winter and autumn, from 09:30 to 18:00 in spring and September, and every day from 09:00 to 20:00 through July and August. The last admission is 45 minutes before closing and the rooms start closing 15 minutes before that. It shuts on 1 January and 25 December, and closes at 15:00 on Christmas Eve.

Those are the figures at the time of writing, and both the prices and the seasonal hours move. Check the Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí’s own visitor page for the current admission prices and Dalí Museum opening hours before you book anything.

Getting there yourself

The address is Plaça Gala i Salvador Dalí 5, 17600 Figueres, in the middle of the old town. The three ways in are below.

• By train. Two stations serve Figueres and they are not interchangeable. Figueres town station, on the conventional line, is about a 15-minute walk from the museum. Figueres-Vilafant, the high-speed station used by Renfe’s fast trains from Barcelona Sants, is further out and takes closer to 25 minutes on foot or a short bus ride. The fast train from Barcelona takes about an hour.
• By car. There is underground parking around the corner from the museum, and it fills quickly in summer, so aim to arrive before opening rather than at midday.
• By bus. Coach lines run to Figueres from Barcelona, from Perpignan across the French border, from Vilafant and along the Maresme coast.

If you want to make more of the trip, Figueres is one corner of the Dalinian Triangle, along with Dalí’s house at Portlligat near Cadaqués and Gala’s castle at Púbol. Doing two of the three properly means an overnight, and Booking.com covers Figueres, Cadaqués and the rest of the Costa Brava.

Going with a tour

Several tours run from Barcelona to Figueres, and they solve the train connection and the ticket queue in one booking. Three worth comparing are listed below.

• This small group day tour adds the coastal village of Cadaqués to the museum, so you see the Costa Brava landscape Dalí painted as well as the paintings.
• This half-day tour takes the high-speed train from Barcelona and includes skip-the-line entry, which is the fastest version of the trip.
• This full tour covers the museum and the castle at Púbol that Dalí bought and decorated for Gala, with the guide pointing out the landscapes along the way.

Dalí turns up elsewhere in Catalonia too. The Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya on Montjuïc in Barcelona has work by him, and our Spain guides cover the rest of the country.

We received two complimentary entrance tickets to the Dalí Theatre-Museum. The opinions here are my own, including the parts about the lighting and the missing melting clocks.

WonderfulWanderings Pro Tips

The 4 tips below come from two attempts at getting into this museum, one of which failed, and from re-reading the Foundation’s own ticket and timetable pages, and each one changes how the day goes.

1. Arrive 20 minutes before opening. There was already a queue when we did it, and we were inside five minutes after the doors opened. The visit my parents abandoned years earlier failed for exactly the opposite reason, and that was before timed online tickets existed.
2. Find the arrows before you pick a direction. The route starts in a corridor circling the central courtyard, and the numbering is easy to miss from the entrance. We set off the wrong way round and spent the first rooms disoriented.
3. Check which of the five opening bands your date falls in. The museum changes its hours five times a year, the last admission is 45 minutes before closing, and the rooms begin shutting 15 minutes before that. It closes on 1 January and 25 December, and at 15:00 on Christmas Eve.
4. Do not go looking for a separate jewellery ticket. Dalí Joies is rooms 23 and 24 of the same building and it is covered by the admission you already hold, with 39 pieces from the Owen Cheatham Collection shown beside the 27 drawings Dalí made as their designs.

About the author. This guide is written and maintained by the Wonderful Wanderings editorial team. Wonderful Wanderings was founded in 2012 by Sofie Couwenbergh, and the first-hand notes in this post come from her visit to the Dalí Theatre-Museum in Figueres, on a trip down from the south of France. The team covers Catalonia and the rest of Spain for independent travellers, including the museum tickets, guided tours from Barcelona and Costa Brava hotels worth booking, and updates this page when admission prices and opening hours change.