Then, on August 27 1963, the Surrealist genius, Salvador Dali, went to Perpignan and made a proclamation that changed the reputation of La Gare: "It all became clear in a flash: There, right before me, was the centre of the universe", Dalí said.The painter publically declared that the Perpignan train station was el centre del món, the centre of the world.
Later, Dalí even created a painting entitled ‘L’Estació de Perpinyà’. The work of art is considered to be an exceptional example of the Surrealist movement. The piece, which features a small image of the train station amid figures of rural farm workers, is intensely symbolic of Dali’s obsessive concern with immortality.
Since then, the people of Perpignan have made Dalí one of their most beloved heroes, and the memory of his surreal words will no doubt live on there forever.
Almost 50 years after Dalí’s revelation, Perpignan inaugurated a new train station to receive the TGV high-speed train that connects the city with Catalonia. Aptly, the first trip on the new line was between Perpignan and Figueres, the hometown of Salvador Dalí.
The new station is a state-of-the-art building, with a large shopping area, an auditorium,12,000 square metres of business space and will soon also boast a spectacular sports area. One of its tasks is to boost the neighbourhood of Sant Aciscle, an area damned to the periphery until now that Dalí’s words have been made a reality. The new Centre del Món, a train station facing south, looks towards its sister of Catalonia on the other side of the Pyrenees.
In recent years Catalunya del Nord in general, and Perpignan in particular, have begun to realise that the answer to the neglect and contempt of distant Paris is to be found over the Pyrenees, where a market of seven million people share a language and a culture.
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