Swarming black flies are up there with his other trademarks: ants, skulls, eggs, droopy watches, frail wooden crutches and strange, bleak landscapes topped by bright, blue skies.
To many, the words "Costa Brava" mean only cheapo package-holiday horror: booze, brawls, shoddy hotels. But this is a libel that this northern corner of Catalonia is now doing its best to kill.
Art is one of the weapons it's chosen. Dalí was born here, married here (to the sexually voracious Gala), and lived much of his life here.
A "Dalí Triangle" is being vigorously promoted: the manic Theatre Museum at Figueres, north of Girona, where he's buried in a crypt with all the appurtenances of a (satanic) saint; the delightful Salvadore Dalí House, which he created at the hamlet of Port Lligat from a cluster of fishermen's cottages; and, at Púbol, Gala's shrine-like castle - like Wagner's Ring rescored for Hollywood - that Dalí could only enter by invitation.
The international itinerant purveyor of surrealism is far more rooted in his local landscape and tradition than I ever realised. His sheer brilliance, entangled with sheer charlatanry, suddenly makes more sense here, and not only because of St Narcissus.
I'm here to pay homage to Catalonia - the Costa Brava, its inland towns and the Catalan capital, Barcelona - outside the summer season. I recommend this.
Upcountry, it may be hard to find a place that's open to eat, but you get there in the end. The sun still shines. And you have the pleasures of emptiness.
Even the Dalí museum's coach park is deserted. I am one of only six people at the Port Lligat house, and one of 10 at Gala's castle.
At Port Lligat the whitewashed Salvadore Dalí House is packed with his hoard of kitsch obsessions. Photos of other celebrated moustache-wearers (Stalin, the German Kaiser, Philip IV of Spain). A stuffed polar bear, given to him by the English art collector Edward James and used as an umbrella stand. Little chairs arranged in descending order of size, as in the story of Goldilocks. A sofa imitating the curves of Mae West's lips. A poolside pavilion made in the exact shape of the polyester packaging a new radio came in (packaging and radio are here for you to check). So far, so bizarre.
But one window, deliberately shaped like a picture frame, looks out on to the bay. Still Mediterranean waters are enclosed in a flat, neutral terrain, with sudden irruptions of volcanic rock.
Gazing through it, I can easily see in my mind's eye a vast, grotesque, naked figure looming across the blue sky from one of the islands of the bay. Dalí's landscapes aren't imaginary. They're here.
Mass tourism in Spain began on the Costa Brava in the Fifties. Overtaken by Benidorm and the Balearics, it now risks being a faded voice from the past. An image once acquired is hard to dismantle. As late as 1949, in her travel book Fabled Shore, Rose Macaulay could still speak of "the special individual quality" of the Costa Brava fishing villages.
Coach travel began the assault. This was the nearest bit of cut-price Spain to drive to. The Madrid government had two very simple objectives on the Costa Brava: to rake in foreign currency, and to conduct quiet propaganda that the Spanish shouldn't be treated as pariahs, now that the 1936-39 civil war was sinking into history.
This worked. But as the Costa Brava tourism consultant Josep Capellà observes, the pursuit of "money, money, money" left a dreary legacy.
Some coastal villages, like Cadaqués, from which I walk over the hill-path to Port Lligat, retain the bright, jewel-like appeal that enchanted Rose Macaulay, at least out of season.
Here, stony alleys rise from a tranquil shore; a small white hilltop church is full to bursting with a grand gilded baroque altarpiece.
But all along the Costa Brava, art is one highly appropriate way out of the less and less profitable low-rent maze. After all, tourism had followed, as so often, where artists led.
Once upon a time, the cellist Andrés Segovia took his summer holidays in Lloret de Mar. The painter Marc Chagall called Tossa de Mar a "blue paradise". But the villages of Lloret and Tossa took the first impact of the invasion. Both are now trying hard to redefine themselves.
Four million visitors descend on Lloret each year. The French, often on short stays, come top of the Costa Brava list of visitors; Germans second; the British well behind.
In Lloret, Russians and other eastern Europeans are racing up on the outside track. Lloret's local council is demolishing poorly built property to create new squares. Of the older village, little more than a quiet parish church remains.
Along the Costa Brava coves, I play a little game of spotting flashy villas in the style the Spanish call modernista. This is a fizzy Catalan Magimix blend of art nouveau and art deco. Often somewhat rundown, the villas are relics left by "the Americans" - meaning emigrant Catalans who did well in Cuba or Puerto Rico, and retired home, intent on showing off their wealth.
One such is now the Hotel Diana, with its palm trees and interwar stained glass, on the Tossa de Mar prom.
Tossa - unfortunate name - is more shabby-genteel than shoddy. Here, they remember that a 1950 British film precipitated the flood of visitors. Due homage is paid. Walking up to a picturesque, sun-drenched promontory, I find myself next to a bronze sculpture of a strong-featured woman in an off-the-shoulder dress. This is Ava Gardner, life-size and, like all film stars, much smaller than you'd expect.
The statue was a retrospective thank-you, 50 years after she starred with James Mason in Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, a fantasy romance, mostly shot in Tossa. (A lesser star was John Laurie, now better known as the parody Scotsman in Dad's Army.)
At the Dalí museum, I'd puzzled over the iconography of an old black Cadillac, straight out of the Ava Gardner era, with male and female naked dummies in the back (the man with his chest torn open) and a plump sculpture of a woman standing on the bonnet. High above, on a tall column apparently made out of car tyres, is an old boat of Gala's. The underside exudes huge drops of bright blue blood. The chrome radiator grille of the Cadillac grimaces at me. Sharing a joke? Or a threat?
Something drastic in the Catalan water supply must turn artists into fantasists, I decide. But what? It all goes well beyond the surrealist nightmares of Dalí. There are also the famous modernista imaginings of Antoni Gaudí, whose Barcelona church of the Sagrada Familia, seen at twilight, reminds me of a set of candles, dripping stone instead of wax. (It was incorporated into the logo of the 1992 Olympics.)
I go in pursuit of an answer. A Sherlock Holmes of art.
I dodge past a busker father and son, with accordions on both their backs, arguing about the day's take, and plunge into a narrow side-street of inner Barcelona to find the Picasso Museum.
Andalusian-born but Catalan-bred, at age 15 Picasso was painting fine realistic pictures that capture, for example, the look of the Barcelona waterfront long before Olympics-led regeneration and the city's omnipresent obsession with contemporary design. (Old men I see playing dominoes on the beach-walk at 10am, with wine bottles handy, recall that older world).
Later, Picasso yielded to the Catalan love of fantasy. He turns Velázquez's famous painting of the Spanish court, Las Meninas, into a series of crazed variations: a strip-cartoon of genius.
I then take the funicular up the hill of Montjuïc, so-called because Jews lived here until they were expelled from Spain in 1492, the same year Columbus sailed west. (A poignant exhibition of Jewish life in Girona's entrancing medieval quarter suggests that Columbus himself was a Jew.)
I emerge, blinking, next to the Joan Miró Foundation. This showcases many of Miró's fantasies. All is lightness, beauty, frivolity. This will lift anyone's spirits, even if only as an excuse to stand beside his child-like, roof-top sculptures, painted in nursery colours, in order to take silly photographs. Fantasy as fun.
Ten minutes' walk away, high above the city, in one corner of the vast Catalan National Museum, is an astonishing, world-class collection of Romanesque art, rescued from crumbling ancient churches.
Here, in almost deserted galleries, I reckon I find the origins of the Catalan fantasy style, the essential chemical in the water. Elementary, my dear Watson.
These early anonymous painters love to ram bright colours next to one another. They portray saints and virgins whose distorted faces aren't always due to the fact that the martyr in question is being hammered with nails or sawn in two. I remember with fondness a cross-eyed Joseph and a sceptical ass, bemused by the yowling baby in Mary's crib. Dalí, Gaudí, Miró and Picasso all drank at this artistic fountainhead.
Barcelona and its maritime and landlocked hinterlands are closely linked, and not only through art. Many Barcelonans own weekend homes in the prettier coastal villages. Or in little medieval inland towns like Pals, almost destroyed in the civil war and scrupulously rebuilt. From the old walls you look out seawards over former marshland ("Pals" comes from the Latin palus, meaning swamp) where, almost unbelievably, rice from the Far East first began to be grown in the 15th century.
The destruction wrought at Pals, with neighbour against neighbour, is one of the recurrent reminders of the traumas that still underlie Spanish society. Dalí ended up on the opposite side of the war from Picasso and Miró. In the art, there's almost always a sharp edge to the fantasies.
The beautiful Catalan landscape - calm farms on the plateaux, rocky sea-edge promontories, the hills you glimpsed beyond so many Barcelona streets - hides harsher secrets.
The day I go to Pals turns out to be the anniversary of Franco's death. The local paper runs a large obituary advertisement from a Girona "cultural association", paying tribute.
Alongside it, thanks to some advertising man's even-handedness, is printed a rival obituary, precisely the same size, in memory of "the victims of fascism".
At Girona's castle-like cathedral, the only statues on the baroque façade that survived civil-war iconoclasm are those that represent Faith, Hope and Charity.
The Catalan language, long suppressed under Franco's dictatorship, has re-emerged. The Pals town hall, like many others, flies a Catalan flag and an EU flag, but no Spanish version.
The language is dauntingly full of the letter "x", but you only need remember to pronounce them as "sh". Thus, I notice that the composer of the opera The Queen of Spades, opening soon at Barcelona's grandiose Lyceum theatre, is "Txaikovski". And the dark little fish I see swimming in the sea at Cadaqués, and then munch in a lunchtime sandwich, are "anxoveses". Anchovies.
CHECKLIST
Further information: See tourspain.co.uk.
