Dali's surreal wind-powered organ lacks only a rhinoceros

A giant wind-powered organ dreamt up by Salvador Dali is finally due to resonate down a Catalan hilltop 100 years after the Spanish surrealist artist's birth.

After extensive feasibility studies, engineers at Ramon Llull University in Barcelona have produced two prototypes. Wind-tunnel tests have proved positive.

"We're going to build the first ever surrealist organ," said Josep Puig, spokesman for three local entrepreneurs who raised €1million ($1.68million) to breathe life into the 20-year-old project.

Dali, who died in 1989, first had the idea of a giant organ played by the wind at the end of the 1970s. He wanted the organ's music to be heard by the people of the region of Ampurdan when the fierce tramontane wind blows from the north. Locals say the wind can drive people mad.

"Dali was obsessed by the tramontane. But his original idea came up against technical problems, such as the wind's irregularity," Mr Puig said.

To get round this problem, engineers perfected a revolutionary wind accumulator. The wind blows into the organ via a huge funnel, is channelled past a pressure regulator and blasted out of the instrument's 500 pipes.

The organ can also play itself at the whim of the tramontane, or use fans on calmer days.

Another challenge was finding somewhere to put the contraption, until the project's backers bought the ruined 10th-century castle of Quermanco in the village of Vilajuiga, near Dali's birthplace of Figueras.

The moustachioed surrealist had tried to buy this castle for his wife, Gala. His dream was to install a domesticated rhinoceros to guard the hilltop, with its serene views over the Mediterranean and the Pyrennees.

The open-air pipes will be built of robust materials to withstand the weather and passing birds.

The inaugural concert is set for September 16 next year, by which time those behind the scheme promise to have found the requisite domesticated rhinoceros.

Agence France-Presse