LETTER FROM BARCELONA: This year Barcelona is celebrating the centenary of the region's much-adored - if wayward - Surrealist son, Salvador Dalí; he of the melted clocks, upwards-twirled moustache and delightfully self-confessed madness.
No stone will be left unturned in the artist's colourful and controversial life, as samples of his painting, writing, film-making, rough drafts (everything - including the kitchen sink - if the surreal spirit of Dalí gets his way) is exhibited in a number of venues across the city throughout 2004.
It was here in 1925 that the 21-year-old artist from Figueres in the north-east of Catalonia had his first one-man show. That was at Sala Dalmau, the most avant-garde gallery in the city, where Picasso and Miró had already shown. The young strap with his broad hat, enormous clown's tie and overcoat trailing along the ground couldn't fail to cause a stir.
Any time is a good time to visit the magical, ambitious, arrogant and brazen Barcelona, but Dalí's centenary celebrations have stuck another feather in the city's cap, which, in honour of the occasion, ought to be shaped like a shoe.
Dalí liked to draw hats in the shape of shoes, particularly when he could perch them on the head of his life-long amour and muse, Gala.
Gala's real name was Helena Ivanovna Diakonova and she was born in Russia in 1894, a decade before little Salvador came into the world to replace an older brother of the same name who had died some years previously.
When she met the impish and precociously talented Dalí, Gala was 35 and married to Paul Eluard, the French poet. Almost immediately she dumped her husband and took up with the flamboyant young artist, becoming his model and lover. They remained enraptured with each other until Gala's death in 1982.
The following year Dalí, broken-hearted, set aside his paintbrushes. He died in 1989.
Gala was generous with her muse-worthy qualities because Dalí wasn't her only admirer. While she was still married to Eluard, she inspired a number of different writers and artists, among them Thomas Mann, who based the protagonist in The Magic Mountain on her. Some girls have all the immortality.
Gala's handsome face may be seen floating serenely through some of the 300 Dalí paintings on exhibition at Mass Culture in CaixaForum, which opened yesterday and continues until May 23rd.
Another eagerly anticipated exhibition is "Gaudí-Dalí" in the stunning Casa Mila, designed by Gaudí, who undoubtedly pips Dalí to the post in Barcelona's affections, as you can tell from the order of the names in the exhibition's title.
This favouritism is due in part to the fact that the architect didn't swan off to Paris or America; in fact he rarely left Catalonia in his lifetime.
Antoni Gaudí designed buildings that look like Hansel and Gretel's candy house, covered, as they usually are, by bits and pieces of tile in a multi-coloured mosaic.
The Casa Mila looks like a building that some giant baker doused in too much icing. The spires of the Sagrada Familia are like towering lollipops.
Although Gaudí and Dalí never met, they certainly shared a penchant for the unusual, an imaginative flair and - by some accounts - flabbergasting egoism.
Their work has been compared and contrasted in books and on bar stools many's the time before. "Gaudí-Dalí" runs from April 5th until May 10th.
Barcelonans love Dalí in their customary territorial way and are likely to correct you if you make the faux pas of calling him Spanish. They admire him not simply for his artistic genius but because all Barcelonans love a rebel. As cosmopolitan as they have become, they just can't help themselves; defiance is in their nature.
The women here dress, at all times, for themselves.
No Barcelonan female would be seen dead in the knee boots and lip gloss so beloved of the species in Ireland. The uniform here is a punky mullet hairdo, leg warmers over boxing boots and - remarkably often - a piercing above the upper lip.
But the best example of Catalan defiance is not the fashion, it is the language; apparently thriving, despite an almost 40-year ban under Franco. These days you'll be lucky to find a dual-language signpost in Barcelona as Catalans continue to poke their tongues out at the lisping Castilians, who number close to a million in the city. It becomes sport after a while to watch English-speaking tourists reading from a Spanish dictionary beneath a Catalan signpost.
Had Dalí himself seen such a sight, he may have committed it to canvas. With some fried bacon in the foreground, perhaps.