Salvador Dali was on the 11 of May, 1904 at 8:45am in the town of Figueras, Spain.

He began painting at the age of six and soon discovered Impressionism and Cubism.   His first exhibition takes place in a theatre in Figueras in 1918 and attracts the attention of local critics.

His mother died in Febuary of 1921 and in October of the same year he was accepted to the San Fernando Academy of Painting, Sculpture and Graphic Arts in Madrid.  While living in the Residencia de Estudiantes he met Luis Bunuel and Garcia Lorca and fell in with the soon-to-be Surrealists.  In 1923 he criticised his lecturers, disturbs the peace at the academy and is expelled for a full year.  He is also detained in prison for 35 days for "political reasons."

1926 sees Dali permanently barred from the Academy in October.  This follows his first trip to Paris in April when he meets Pablo Picasso.

Dali and Bunuel create the Surrealist film Un chien andalou in 1929.   Dali was in Paris in the spring and met the surrealists, including Paul Eluard, through Miro.  That summer he met Eluard's wife Gala with whom he falls immediately in love.  This leads to a rupture in his relationship with his father.

1930.  Dali developed his paranoiac-critical method while at the fisherman's cottage he and Gala bought in Port Lligat.  His film, L'âge d'or, again made with Bunuel, was sabotaged in Paris and subsequently banned.

Dali first exhibits in the US in 1932 and returns for a highly successful exhibition in 1934 after a falling-out with André Breton.  His is again criticized by Breton and the surrealists in 1937 for his comments on Hitler.

Dali met Freud in London in July of 1938 and executed several portraits of him.   Dali spent eight years from 1940 to 1948 in the United States where he held an exhibition with Miro at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.  He also published The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, sketched cartoons for Walt Disney and had a hand in Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound.

Dali presented the Théâtre de l'Étoile Paris with a 15-metre loaf of bread in 1958 and the next year presents the "ovocipède" that he has invented.   In 1963 he published The Tragic Myth of Millet's Angelus and starts crediting the Railway Station in Perpignan with a decisive role in the constitution of the universe.  In 1964 Dali published The Diary of a Genius.

The Salvador Dali Museum opened in Cleveland, Ohio in 1971 with the E. and A. Reynolds Morse private collection.  It was moved to Saint Petersburg, Florida in 1982.

Gala died on the 10 June, 1982.  Shortly thereafter Dali was made the Marquès de Pubol by King Juan Carlos I of Spain and moved into the castle at Pubol.  In 1983 the Dali perfume was created and Dali painted his last picture: "Swallowtail."   In 1984 he was badly burnt in a fire at Pubol castle and moved to the Torre Galatea where he died in 1989.

He died 23 of January, 1989 bequeathing his entire fortune and all his works to the Spanish state.  He is buried in the crypt of the meseum in Figueras, mummified and on display under a glass dome as he himself wished.