With its silhouette of white houses placed around the bay and the church that crowns the complex, Cadaqués maintains, even today, a postcard photo. Possibly it has been this image of a picturesque, seafaring and bohemian town, which has helped to forge its legend. That is Cadaqués, a myth that has remained over time, except in summer, of course, which is now dying of success.
Isolated for centuries from the rest of the continent by the Sierra del Pení, it was not until the beginning of the s. XX that, thanks to the construction of the new layout of the highway of Roses by the Perafita, the first tourists began to arrive.
It was then when some bourgeois families residing in Figueres, Girona or Barcelona, ??linked to Cadaqués for different reasons, chose this town as their summer resort. This is what the Pitxot, the Colom, the Dalí, the Salleras, the Sagi, the Marquina, the Salisachs, the Cusí, the Bosoms, the Camí, the Mandri and a few others did, who had the privilege of discovering the authentic Cadaqués, a small town, walled in, windswept, and of such splendid beauty that it captivated them.
They are the usual colony, the one of a lifetime, the cul blancs, who had settled in the town before the civil war, and have left a network of children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren who remain addicted, proud of his past.
The Pitxots were the first foreigners to spend the summer in Cadaqués. They are still here, in their mythical houses on Punta del Sortell, with Sa Conca beach on one side and the town on the other. “In our family, no one ever thought of selling. Now it is no longer possible because he is undivided, but it doesn’t matter. We have divided the houses and, even so, we have to share” say Taia and Gemma Pitxot. His great-great-grandparents, Ramón Pitxot Mateu and Antonia Gironès Bofill, arrived here around 1890, quite a feat.
“The couple lived in Barcelona. He was a notary, dedicated to business, and she, born in Figueres, had a relative in the town, so she insisted on coming – say her great-granddaughters – They arrived at night, and Cadaqués seemed so miserable and sad, They planned to leave the next day. But when they woke up and saw the panorama, they fell hopelessly in love. Antonia, who was a determined woman, bought the Sortell peninsula and gave it to her husband as a gift. That was a totally barren rock, without even a tree, so they put dynamite, flattened it and built a first little house, which they opened in 1899, and it grew over the years”.
Here the clan formed by the Pitxot couple, their seven children, their partners and their numerous friends met in the summer months. “Except Antonio, who went to Cuba when he was still very young, the other six were artists – Taia and Gemma point out – Ramón was a painter; Maria married the musician Joan Gay and became a famous opera singer; Mercedes married the poet Eduardo Marquina; Luis played the violin; Ricardo, our great-grandfather, the cello; and Pepito, who was the eldest, studied law, but gave it up to dedicate himself fully to gardening. He designed wonderful French-style gardens for this house that were lost in the war.”
Getting to the town was then quite an adventure. The Pichots went to Figueres by train and to Cadaqués by tartana, which meant a tiring journey of more than nine hours, because the recently opened road was nothing more than a dusty track, and in La Perafita they had to change the exhausted mules. Despite this, his house was a continuous parade of artists: Manuel de Falla, Andrés Segovia, Albéniz, Rusiñol, Manolo Hugué, Enrique Granados, Federico García Lorca, Manuel Azaña, Ignacio Zuloaga… even Picasso, who was a great friend of Ramón’s. , during his stay in Cadaqués in 1910, he visited them often, and many mornings they sailed together.
“The summers in Cadaqués were a delight – recalls Teresa Marquina–. My family lived in Madrid, but as soon as July arrived here we were. My grandmother had a passion for her little brothers, Luis and Ricardo, and her husband, Eduardo Marquina, was one of the Pitxots. Sometimes Grandma Mercedes was left alone in this house, but in Llanér there were the Dalí, the Salleras, and on the other side of the bay, the Colom / Martí Codolar, her great friends. There was no one else.”
Gabriel Colom and Soledad Martí Codolar were the owners of a 4.5 ha farm called “el Castell”, located on top of a small hill in front of the Pianc beach. Mr. Colom, who was a shipowner, had discovered Cadaqués on one of his voyages, it was a real crush. He bought the land and built the large manor house, with a ground floor and two floors, where since its inauguration in 1902 the whole family spent the summer.
“At that time it was not usual to go out for the summer so far, they came from Barcelona, ??and the trip in the carriage could last several days – says Consuelo Crespo, her great-granddaughter – What is now a garden, was a desert, they planted, so one by one, all these macrocarpas and, since there was no water, the women of the town came with the dolls at the head to water them. My grandmother Consuelo and hers, her brothers, Mercedes, María and Luis, grew up here and spent their summers here. He told me that on Sundays they organized sardanas in the garden, and sometimes, parties with fireworks that lit up the entire bay.”
Consuelo and María Colom married Pepe and Manuel Bofill, two brothers orphaned at a very young age. His in-laws, the Coloms, decided to sell the farm to give them a dowry that would help them start their professional lives. It was bought by Soledad’s single brothers, Ángeles and Javier Martí Codolar, so it has continued in the family.
“My grandmother Mercedes, who was married to the pediatrician Ricardo Zariquey, also received an amount of money – says Lina Zendrera – At first, they rented a house in the center of town, but the grandmother, who from the room of her parents’ house His parents had always contemplated the vineyards of the Perafet peninsula, he longed for himself. When her father died and inherited a very valuable ring, she sold it and with the money they bought the Perafet, where from 1947 all of her descendants spent the summers.
“Grandma Consuelo told me that they were very close friends with the Raholas, owners of the pharmacy in Poal, and with Mercedes Pitxot, married to Eduardo Marquina. In fact, she and my aunts would row to her house in Es Sortell and, in the afternoons, they would have tea together”, says Consuelo Crespo.
Salvador Dalí i Cusí, notary from his native Figueres, neighbor and friend of the Pitxots, was another of the pioneers in choosing Cadaqués. In his house, located on the Llaner Gran beach, next to the sea, the siblings Salvador and Ana María spent the summer since they were very young. It was here, where Salvador began to paint, where he received his friends Lorca and Buñuel, where he met Gala, and where he finally broke up with his family.
Through the mediation of Salvador Dalí, Vicente Salleras Camps and his wife, Rosa Pla, also arrived in Cadaqués. “They lived in Figueras, very close to the notary Salvador Dalí, with whom they had a great friendship – says Elena Salleras – Invited by him, my great-grandparents went up to Cadaqués one fine day accompanied by their two sons, Juan and José, and just next to the house that the Dalís had, they discovered a small fishermen’s shack with a huge olive grove behind and they bought it”.
The Salleras brothers were very close, both sentimentally and professionally, which is why they decided to build here, in Llaner, a large house with the air of a farmhouse that was divided in two, half for each, and in the back a Noucentista garden both families enjoyed equally. A door communicated the dining rooms of both houses, in large celebrations the door was opened and the two tables were joined.
“Those were very glamorous times, a lot of uniformed service and with a cap – says Elena Salleras – my grandmother Dolores told me that many afternoons she would go with Josefina Cusí and Ana María Dalí, walking to the lighthouse, with wonderful dresses and matching umbrellas. They also had parties in the garden and Llorens, who was the gardener, boatman, etc., would decorate it with lanterns.”
“In the afternoons, the gentlemen dressed in white linen and went out in a boat, which is why in the town the summer visitors were called the Cul Blancs – recalls Carlos Salleras, and adds – me, my brothers and my cousins, we have spent summers in this house since we were born. My grandfather, Pepe Salleras, married Dolores Gummá, daughter of a family of pharmacists enriched thanks to Serventinal, a product for stomach pain. His brother, Alejandro, was the one who bought the entire mountain between the Llaner Petit beach and Sa Conca, entrusting the architect Pelayo Martínez Paricio with the construction of a large house for his family that was opened after the war. In 1956 one of her sons converted it into the Hotel Rocamar.”
Can Salleras was inaugurated in 1920. Two years later, Pedro Salisachs Jané, a wealthy industrialist from Barcelona, ??landed in Llané with his wife, Sofía Roviralta, and their four children. She was a close friend of Andrés Segovia’s wife who was spending time at the Pitxot house, and she encouraged her husband to go visit them. Mr. Salisachs was fascinated by the light of Cadaqués, and looked for a piece of land facing the sea, bathed in the sun all day, to settle down. He found it at the end of the Llaner beach, and there he built his house. The building, designed by the architect Ricard Segalà i Subirana, in a modernist style, with a square plan, three floors and a mezzanine, looked like a skyscraper at the time and the residents were horrified. But the couple was crazy successful, they became friends with everyone.
El Llaner was becoming the summer neighborhood with the best atmosphere in Cadaqués. In front of the Llaner Petit beach, a certain Mr. Costa had built a neo-medieval style building, after returning from the New World. Manuel Bofill and María Colom had also settled here, and other friends who lived in the center of town came by boat, like Gastón Escofet, who came rowing and with a sailor from Port d’Alguer, or Francisco Rahola, who guarded the his in front of the “si no fos”, and every day he came with his seven children to Llaner, where he and the other families set up their awnings every summer.
In the mornings, little Salvador played soccer on the beach with Josep Samitier and Emilio Sagi, who also spent the summer in Cadaqués, joined by Joan Xirau, another good friend and fellow student of Salvador’s, and Lluís Marquina and Josep Gay, his neighbors of Sortell. In the afternoons, when the weather was good, the vacationers used to go out again by boat to go for a snack in a cove a little further away.
On the other side of the bay, in Riba del Poal, most of the houses were closed. The people of the town were not in favor of living on the front line, since the riba as we know it now did not exist, the sea water entered the basement of the houses causing humidity and requiring a lot of maintenance. Doctor Octavio Serinyana, who lived in Barcelona, ??but was a descendant of one of the families with the longest seafaring tradition in Cadaqués, enriched in Cuba, was one of the first to bet on this location when he bought, in 1910, on the first line de mar, a simple fisherman’s house that the architect Salvador Sellés integrated into the construction of a stately building, in a modernist style, in which he wanted to record his origins. After several years of works, the Serinyana house (the blue house) was crowned on September 20, 1913.
For the people of the town, the vacationers were always strangers, the colony that opened its houses in June and closed them at the end of September, leaving the town silent and still again. At a different level were the families from Cadaqués – Serinyana, Rahola, Escofet, Xirau, Sala, Callís, Pont, Tremols… – wealthy and enterprising people, who went to study or work abroad, developed their lives there and returned in summer because here were their homes and their families.
The “nos amb nos” of Cadaqués was implacable, it took many generations to be part of it. The Salas, who arrived by sea in 1820, earned it hard. Nobody ever disputed their roots with the Rahola, the Escofet, two of the most important sagas of the place, nor with the Xirau, who owned all of Perafita and lived in Figueres, but had always spent their summers in Cadaqués.
After the war, between the forties and fifties, when Cadaqués was still a small, impoverished and forgotten town, a second wave of vacationers arrived, and after it another, and another, and another. Summers in Cadaqués is full of little stories, stories of anonymous and media vacationers, who have been drawing their identity through the years: their legend.