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To visit Barcelona\u2019s soaring Sagrada Familia basilica is to visit a parallel universe in which architectural modernism barely happened, symbolism and decoration remained acceptable and we kept creating places with joy, natural patterns and a whiff of the sacred.<\/p>\n
The 144-year-old construction site also offers a 21st-century glimpse of the medieval era, where whole lifetimes were spent in the shadow of great churches, towers and steeples inching slowly towards the heavens. Florence Cathedral took 140 years to build. Toledo\u2019s took 267 years. La Sagrada Familia, designed by the great Catalan architect Antoni Gaudi, was started in 1882; 144 years later, they are still building it \u2013 a continuous bridge spanning our present with the lives of our great-great-grandparents.<\/p>\n
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Fireworks mark the inauguration of the Tower of Jesus Christ by Pope Leo XIV at the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona last week.AP<\/p>\n
The Sagrada Familia Foundation recently completed the 163-metre central Torre de Jesus (Jesus Christ Tower), an achievement marked by the visit of Pope Leo XIV, who inaugurated the tower on June 10 \u2013 one century to the day since Gaudi\u2019s death. But they are not finished. The Facana de la Gloria (Glory Facade), depicting eternal life and set to be the basilica\u2019s most elaborate entrance, requires another decade.<\/p>\n
La Sagrada Familia is to Barcelona<\/a> what Notre Dame<\/a> and the Eiffel Tower combined are to Paris: simultaneously church and state, sacred space and secular symbol, God\u2019s house and the city\u2019s icon. Begun as a conventional Gothic church in a Latin cross shape by Francesco del Villar, who quickly resigned, it was transformed by Gaudi into one of the world\u2019s most ambitious and recognisable buildings. It is not a cathedral, though most visitors assume that it is. It combines Gothic aspiration, Christian symbolism, Catalan craft and forms drawn from nature. Columns branch like trees. The stone seems to grow. The building\u2019s high nave rises as a forest of tapering trunks reaching towards the canopy of light.<\/p>\n An engineering high-wire act<\/p>\n Sign up for the Traveller Deals newsletter<\/p>\n Get exclusive travel deals delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up now.<\/a><\/p>\n I was fortunate enough to be shown around by the church\u2019s lead architect, Jordi Fauli, a quiet man in a proper suit with a well-thumbed book of Gaudi\u2019s drawings bulging from one pocket (a scale model nestles in another). With his team of 10 designers, Fauli is overseeing a building of global significance. He is therefore one of the world\u2019s most consequential living architects. Yet few know his name. You will seek in vain for any recent reference to him in the British architectural press. As we thread our way between the pressing crowds, none of the thronging tourists recognise him or spare us a second glance.<\/p>\n As a child in the Catalan countryside in the 1850s, Gaudi had a sharp eye for nature and the everyday. Fauli explains, as we walk through the nave, that the church\u2019s tricks all derive from close natural observation. Studying trees and Gothic cathedrals, experimenting for a decade with string-hung weights, Gaudi evolved a new system of parabolic arches and arboreal columns with trunks, nodes like tree knots and higher \u201cbranches\u201d spanning out to support the roof.<\/p>\n The result is breath-catching. A forest of 52 columns, one for each Sunday of the year, holds up the high roof with no flying buttresses, despite its immense height. Their lower parts are made from different stones according to the weight they bear: Montju\u00efc sandstone in the side naves, granite in the central nave, basalt around the crossing and red porphyry for the four great central columns.<\/p>\n Above the building, Gaudi planned 18 towers: 12 bell towers representing the apostles and six taller central towers representing Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary and the four Evangelists. Only four remain unbuilt. The church\u2019s 16 central columns carry the six immense towers that now dominate Barcelona\u2019s skyline. This is an engineering high-wire act of space-age ambition, all evolved by a model-building recluse in a workshop without computers or calculators.<\/p>\n Light, curves and colour are everywhere. Hyperboloid skylights lined with reflective glass scatter sky through the ceiling just as light penetrates through the leaves of a forest. The east-facing Fa\u00e7ana del Naixement, or Nativity Fa\u00e7ade, is a rainforest in stone, brimming with fronds and faces, people and palms seemingly woven into the building. Tourists stare, stupefied. I don\u2019t blame them. When it first emerged from its scaffolding in November 1925, Gaudi asked his workmen, \u201cDon\u2019t you think it joins heaven and earth?\u201d One, open-mouthed, replied, \u201cfa goig\u201d \u2013 \u201cit\u2019s beautiful\u201d.<\/p>\n Climb up into the towers. Endless decoration peeps out, otherwise visible only to drones, birds and, as with medieval cathedrals, to God. The towers are a chequerboard of different stones and of lozenge-shaped windows. They are not cuboids or pyramids like most medieval steeples but tall, tapering and honeycombed as if Gothic towers had grown from the soil rather than been drawn by hand.<\/p>\n The textured surfaces with their patterned stone incisions recall an extended pigeon coop. Swallows and house martins agree. They have colonised the towers, flashing in and out of the hundreds of holes, skimming and sweeping around the basilica\u2019s roofs and windows. Gaudi\u2018s design was premised on nature. A century after his death, nature has made itself at home.<\/p>\n Gaudi was a paradox of a man, a radical who was also a reactionary, a supposed harbinger of architectural modernism who was also profoundly Catholic. A delicate dandy in his youth (his brother wore his shoes in for him), he evolved into an ascetic recluse. Photos of him in old age are rare, so effectively did he shun publicity.<\/p>\n Appropriately for a Catalan conservative, Gaudi came from a family of metalworkers, one of the great craft traditions of Barcelona. Four generations had forged iron. His family home was even called Mas de la Caldera, Cauldron Maker\u2019s House. Some of the basilica\u2019s metalwork, for example the iron net meshing around the central column of the Nativity Fa\u00e7ade, was wrought by his own hands. You can touch it as you walk past, placing your hand where Gaudi once felt the cooled metal.<\/p>\n For the people<\/p>\n \u201cOrnament\u201d, wrote the Victorian writer John Ruskin, \u201cis the origin of architecture\u201d. Gaudi agreed. The 20th century did not. George Orwell described La Sagrada Familia as \u201cone of the most hideous buildings in the world\u201d. Barcelona\u2019s intelligentsia long criticised it as a waste of funds \u2013 ironically for a church that now earns \u20ac150m in tourist income every year, funding its own construction. The art critic Robert Hughes called the church a \u201cclich\u00e9\u201d and \u201crampant kitsch\u201d.<\/p>\n Related Article The people disagree. Something about La Sagrada Familia\u2019s mix of faith, symbolism and modernity clearly touches the public. It is Spain\u2019s most visited monument. Last year nearly 4.9 million came: modern-day pilgrims<\/a>, some reverently and self-consciously Catholic, others less coherently seeking revelation via selfie sticks and Instagram. Patterns of human behaviour are unchanging. Tourists are banned from some portions of the city\u2019s Gaudi buildings due to their propensity to pry off chips or strip tiles, like medieval pilgrims at a saint\u2019s tomb. We covet what we revere.<\/p>\n One reason tourists come to stare is, doubtless, that they have been told they should. But that is not all. Gaudi\u2019s basilica really is that overused word, \u201cunique\u201d. Every city has a cathedral. Only Barcelona has La Sagrada Familia. Only here can we tread in an alternate reality unafflicted by the catastrophe of \u201ctraffic modernism\u201d that has ruined our cities for a century, and where traditional design just kept on going.<\/p>\n When Gaudi lay dying, he refused to be moved to a posher and more expensive hospital. \u201cHere is where I belong,\u201d he whispered, \u201camong the poor.\u201d Gaudi would doubtless side with the public, not the elites, in defence of the church that he caused to exist and which, alongside Jordi Fauli and his team, he is still building posthumously, a century after his death. Perhaps he would cite St Thomas Aquinas, whose writings influenced him: \u201cPulchrum est quod visum placet\u201d \u2013 \u201cBeauty is that which gives pleasure when seen.\u201d<\/p>\n Nicholas Boys Smith is founder and chairman of Create Streets and a visiting professor of architecture at the University of Strathclyde.<\/p>\n The Telegraph, London<\/p>\n Save<\/p>\n You have reached your maximum number of saved items.<\/p>\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/5f281c483c82fa73358b7e17c394f965bd3e5a68.jpeg\")
The basilica\u2019s soaring central tower was completed in October 2025.AP![\"Pope](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/da9446decd35ffb2750d7e1ca4943c3880652502.jpeg\")
Pope Leo XIV (centre) celebrates Mass in the Basilica of the Sagrada Familia last Wednesday.AP<\/p>\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/25b5e2d6dc82bb85061ef2e359449f367af2a180.jpeg\")
The ceiling at the Basilica of the Sagrada Familia.APConnecting heaven and earth<\/p>\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/55a0bc261fd1417f500f3ff0bbf5c2989d6bb401.jpeg\")
The Sagrada Familia\u2019s 18 towers stand at various heights, with the tallest being 172.5m high.Getty Images<\/p>\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/5e5c57d24ad1af0033c9b50b2197a7a53664d1ab.jpeg\")
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