Cadaqués has souvenir shops like any tourist village, but it also has something much less common: workshops where the person serving you is the person who made what you're buying. A jeweller who's spent twenty years in her workshop on Carrer Vigilant, an illustrators' studio in what used to be Joan Tharrats's gallery, more than sixty resident artists with their studio doors open. Shopping here can be an act of mass tourism or a conversation with the person who made the piece. This guide is about the second kind.
Gemma Ridameya: jewellery as pocket-sized sculpture
On Carrer Vigilant, Gemma Ridameya has spent twenty years designing jewellery she herself describes better with her hands than any brochure could: pieces conceived as small-format sculpture, drawing on African ritual art. It's not a shop with a workshop behind it; it's a workshop with a counter in front, and that difference shows in every piece.
It's the kind of purchase that ages well: in ten years you won't remember the fridge-magnet shop, but you will remember the jeweller in Cadaqués who showed you her work at her own workbench.
El Taller de Tabakov, in Tharrats's old Sirena
At Riba Pitxot 6, a couple of illustrators work: Elodie Loiseleur, French, and Javi Aznarez, an illustrator trained in Barcelona. Their Taller de Tabakov occupies a space with a pedigree: it was La Sirena, the library-gallery of Joan Tharrats, one of the names in Catalan art tied to the village.
It's a very Cadaqués chain of events: an art space that, once vacated, didn't become an ice-cream shop but the studio of other artists. The walls change hands, but not trade.
Studios with the door open
More than sixty artists live in Cadaqués today, and many work with their studio open to visitors. The roster is a small map of the world: Uruguayan painter and sculptor Sbarbaro on Carrer Unió, Catalan sculptor Natalia Tomas on Eduard Marquina, German artist Daniel Zerbst with his painting and collage on Carrer Nou, Ramon Moscardó and his Mediterranean themes on Hort d'en Sanés, or Bernd Block and his iron sculpture on Avinguda Caritat Serinyana.
Walking into a studio is less intimidating than it sounds: the open door is an invitation. You look, you ask if you feel like it, and you leave with or without a piece, but always with something.
Local design shops and vintage
For anyone who prefers a shop to a workshop, there are stops worth the detour. Sa Botigueta, on Avinguda Víctor Rahola since 2008, gathers gifts, jewellery, and bags in-house designs and by local designers. On Plaça de l'Estrella, Moksha digs through vintage finds, and Cheveríssima Vintage, on Caritat Serinyana, calls itself an art space that rescues pieces from other eras.
None of the three sells anything you need, which is exactly the point: they're shops for browsing slowly, touching things, and letting yourself be talked into something, with the white village waiting outside.
The sweet thing for the road: Cadaqués's taps
And since any village shopping trip should end in something to eat, note the local edible souvenir: taps de Cadaqués, sponge cakes shaped like champagne corks that are the speciality of Pastelería Mallorquina, near Plaça Doctor Trémols. Along with the historic Pastisseria Quer — five generations since 1879 — and bakeries like Es Fornet, they round out the village's sweet map.
A bag of taps survives the trip home better than any figurine, and it has one final advantage over every other souvenir: it disappears. Which is the perfect excuse to come back.