Salvador Dali reburied in his tomb after paternity tests prove negative

Three decades after he died and eight months after his remains were disinterred to settle a paternity claim, Salvador Dali has once again been laid to rest, in his entirety, beneath the museum he designed as a shrine to his own life and art.

The surrealist’s body was exhumed from its tomb in Figueres, Catalonia, in July after a judge gave the go-ahead to DNA tests to establish whether Dali was the father of Pilar Abel, a tarot card reader and fortune-teller who had long claimed to be his daughter.

Hair, nail and bone samples taken from the body proved he was not her father. The exhumation did, however, reveal that the artist’s trademark moustache was still intact.

In the early hours of Friday morning, the samples were reunited with the rest of his remains, which lie beneath a stone slab weighing 1.5 tonnes.

“Last night, the DNA samples were returned,” the Gala-Salvador Dali Foundation said in a short statement. “The mortal remains of Salvador Dali have been reburied and lie beneath the dome of the Figueres Theatre-Museum. The procedure was the same as it was last July and was once again designed to preserve the Master’s privacy and memory.”