Barcelona: It's About Time

The half-chicken was juicy, delicious. As for the pitcher of sangria, I'm convinced there is no bad wine in Spain, whatever you do with it. And you can get a fine bottle for $7 or $8. This, after all, is a city taken over in 218 B.C. by Romans who drank, on average, a pint of wine a day -- though their blends often included honey and herbs and a subtle splash of saltwater.

A Big Dose of Madness

By midweek, we had a quarter of our must-see attractions checked off and a handful of nightclubs under our belt. It was time to unwind in Cadaques, with its red-tile roofs and whitewashed walls leading down to the sea.

Cadaques, close by the Spanish-French border, is about a 2 1/2 -hour drive from Barcelona, and it's packed in high season. But we were early, and we found the old fishing village and artists' haunt in a sweet, sleepy, seductive spring mood.

We wandered its long seawall, sucking up the fresh salt air and watching bright-blue fishing boats bob at anchor, then walked up skinny, steep cobbled side streets to a lovely little church begun in the 16th century, Eglisia de Santa Maria, where the Virgin of Hope was attended by the patron saints of the Impossible and the Storms. Down another side street, I found the little Musee Cadaques, with a photo display of Dali at his home in Port Lligat, a short hike away. There, in a labyrinthine house adorned with giant white eggs, the artist who once said, "I don't take drugs. I am drugs," entertained poets, filmmakers and artists with experimental "happenings" in the '60s and '70s.

Dali's mustachioed visage was everywhere in Cadaques: in graffiti on stucco walls, inside frames in seaside boutiques, across the face of one of his restaurant hangouts, El Baracco. Our hotel, Hotel Residencia, was an indoor shrine to the surrealist. Weird mirrors morphed on walls, mannequins had lamps for arms, and books on Dali covered every surface.

Still, we didn't see the master's mind unleashed until we drove into his nearby home town of Figueres to the Teatro-Museo Dali, where the artist lies buried in a crypt beneath a grand geodesic cupola. The mad sweep of his work was staggering. He experimented with hologram portraits, room installations, Rube Goldberg-like contraptions. He repainted Dutch still lifes and created masterful Michelangelo-esque frescoes with boggling new perspective. He riffed on Picasso and Cézanne, Mondrian and Matisse, and experimented with photography and stereoscopy.

He broke all the rules, then put them back together to suit his fancy -- something, I mused as we headed back to Barcelona, that must be endemic to this northeastern corner of the country.

Don't Stop the Music

When we returned to "Barnca," we had three days left to pack it in.

We spent one of them at Fundacio Joan Miró, whisked by funicular up the Montjuic hill to the high-ceilinged, light-filled museum. Miró's abstract moons and stars, birds and stick-figure humans flew across canvas, loose and loopy. Our next day was devoted to the Maritime Museum, housed inside beautifully restored royal shipyards that date to the 13th century. Beneath its scores of flying buttresses, ancient shipwrights cut sails, braided rope and formed great ribs of war galleys.

Tours of the magnificent music hall Palau de la Musica Catalona were sold out, so we did the next logical thing: Bought tickets for an evening performance with a popular singer who, we were assured, was "magnifico." She wasn't, not even close. But it was worth the chance to revel in the ornate splendor of the hall, with its huge mosaic columns, a chandelier that seems to describe the sun, and flying 3-D Pegasuses that burst from the wall, their hooves pawing the air.

After the limpid New Age pop, I was longing for some real music. At midnight, in the Barri Gotic, we slid into the Harlem Jazz Club, a kick-back place with live jazz, blues, flamenco, fusion, reggae and African music on the menu. We hit it on folk night, with a talented acoustic guitar duo that covered Sting, Van Morrison and Dylan, adding playful tempos, Spanish riffs and Catalan vocal runs up the melodic scale. When the duo broke into a lively rendition of Bob Marley's "No Woman, No Cry," the whole house, all ages, all languages, joined in.

We were in for one more Barnca-fest. Our final night, we hit an African music festival at the Bikini Night Club. The star was Nino Galissa, a songwriter from Guinea-Bissau who makes melodic magic on a stringed kora almost as long as he is tall. The audience stood, then moved, then collectively grooved to the gathering world beats of the kora, guitars, bongos.

As we rocked out, I thought about leaving this wild city by the sea. My mind wound 'round with images of earth tunnels, flowing metal, horned devils, giant eggs, buildings covered in scales, mannequins with lamps for arms.

Then the lights came on. I wiped the sweat off my face and looked at my Swatch.

2:30 a.m. And I wasn't a bit tired.

M.L. Lyke last wrote for Travel about winging it on vacation.