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Whether or not the tramontana has some fundamental effect on people’s behaviour seems to be a parlour game that journalists occasionally prod scientists to play. An article cited on the Salvador Dali Forum (with no source given) begins with the usual opening move, this time courtesy of Antoni Bulbena of the Barcelona Psychiatric Institute.

You can’t say that a personality such as Dali’s is a product of the winter wind from the north, the professor reaffirms. The article cites a behavioral study that found a link between the tramontana and personality traits among some people of the Emporda, though no proof that the gusts nurture genius.

But there is a minority opinion among “some experts”, the article continued, that there is a direct cause-and-effect relationship between the tramontana and the personality of some artists and intellectuals.

Psychoanalyst Carles Frigola is quoted as saying the wind’s extreme dryness modifies fundamental physical “energies”, and the result is evident in “all the inhabitants of the Emporda … although people only remember Salvador Dali or other well-known personages because of the universal dimension of their character”. Frigola said the locals are more excitable when the wind blows.

The article ends, on par, by avowing that the only certainty about the tramontana is that it’s invoked by every writer, musician and graphic artist from the region, from Carles Fages de Climent’s “Oracio to the Crist of the Tramuntana” to Dali’s 1968 “The Crist of the Tramuntana”, with poet Joan Maragall and author Pere Coromines in between.

Only slightly more helpfully, the forum featured another article in June 2003, evidently from someone who had interviewed Dali in July 1985 for the newspaper Today.

Physically feeble and speaking with great dificulty, Dali said he’d wanted to buy the castle at Quermanco, but no one knew the owner’s identity. “I think he lived abroad,” Dali said, though the author points out that the owner was actually living in Vilajuiga at the time.

Dali then set off on “a long digression” that the interviewer and Antoni Pixtot stuggled to follow, about the Grail legend, into which Dali inserted a confluence of Sant Pere de Roda, the chapel of Santa Helena and the castles of Sant Salvador and Quermanco — the last as a shelter for “the magician Klingsor”.

This article mentions another, written by Joan Xirau, which had said Quermanco was name-dropped in Studium, the magazine that Dali and other students at “Figueras High School” produced in 1919.