Cadaqués today has more than 15 art galleries and over 60 artists living in the village, but almost every story starts with the same one: Galeria Cadaqués, founded on 27 July 1973 by Lanfranco Bombelli Tiravanti, an Italian-Swiss architect who cleared out an old anchovy factory to turn it into an exhibition space. Between 1973 and 1997, that gallery gave the first Spanish exhibitions to names like Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Beuys, David Hockney, and Jasper Johns. No New York gallerists, no museum curators: a fishing village, an abandoned industrial building, and a man who wanted to honour a friend.
An anchovy factory turned temple of art
Before it was a gallery, the building at Carrer Hort d'En Sanés 7 was an anchovy-curing factory, one of Cadaqués's traditional trades. Bombelli had also restored a section of the village cemetery to bury his friend Peter G. Harnden, and that same impulse — friendship, not business — is what led him to clear out the old factory and turn it into a space for showing contemporary art.
The result, between 1973 and 1997, was extraordinary for the village's size: for a quarter of a century, Cadaqués became the place where Spain first saw the work of artists like Marcel Duchamp, Richard Hamilton, Joseph Beuys, John Cage, David Hockney, Jasper Johns, or Dieter Roth.
From Bombelli to Huc Malla
After a period of closure, Huc Malla reopened the gallery in 2003 with Bombelli's own blessing. In 2013, marking the 40th anniversary of its founding, the space was officially renamed Galeria Cadaqués – Huc Malla, the name it keeps today.
The gallery is still in the same building on Carrer Hort d'En Sanés, and it's still, by far, the historic reference point of the Cadaqués art scene — one that today includes more than 15 active galleries in a village of just a few thousand people.
Why Cadaqués attracted so much art
Cadaqués's connection to 20th-century art doesn't begin or end with Salvador Dalí, even though his house in Portlligat is why many visitors first come. What Bombelli did with his gallery, and what dozens of artists with open studios in the village keep alive today, is the other side of that same story: a remote place, hard to reach by road, that for decades has proved paradoxically magnetic for people looking to work away from the noise.
Walking today through the streets of the centre and stopping at a handful of these galleries — many with the artist working in plain view — is one of the most authentic ways to understand what Cadaqués is beyond the beach and the seafront promenade.