A Barcelona temple under construction for 135 years

La Sagrada Família may finally be completed by 2027

A tram ambling down the main street of Barcelona on June 7, 1926 hit an old man in shabby clothes and unraveling bandages. The man lay there on the side of the street all day, until a police officer finally took him to a hospital. He had no identification on him, and seeing the way he was dressed, they presumed he was a beggar.
 
By the time a chaplain recognised him the following day, the condition of Antoni Gaudí, Barcelona’s most celebrated architect, had worsened. He died two days later and was buried in the crypt of La Sagrada Família — the temple where he’d lived for the past year. The whole city gathered to bid him farewell. Even today, the tomb of the man called “the Architect of the Gods” can be visited under the temple.
 
While Gaudí’s unique blend of neo-gothic, modernist and naturalist architecture is the pride of Barcelona, and there are innumerable tours and websites that show you his famous buildings such as Park Guell and Casa Batlo, La Sagrada Família is extraordinary. 

The Façade of Birth under construction in 1908

 
When construction began in 1882, it was supposed to be a simple Roman Catholic Church. After the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona, it caught the imagination of the world, and it became the most visited monument in all of Spain, with more than 2 million visitors a year.
 
In November 2010, Pope Benedict XVI declared it a Basilica — a place of pilgrimage, or the site where a saint is buried.
 
But La Sagrada Família (which means “holy family” in Spanish) is a Temple Expiatori — built with funds for atonement or sacrifice, and it’s still unfinished. “My client is not in a hurry,” Gaudí once said.

He took over the leadership of the works in 1883, and spent 43 years working on the building. He should have taken his own words to heart — he was worrying about raising money to fund the building when he was hit by the tram. Even today, the massive construction is supported by donations, alms or the money collected from entrance tickets.

A close-up of the Birth of Christ on the Façade of Birth

 
I first went to La Sagrada Família on a “hop-on, hop-off” tour in 2010. It was a scorching day and we’d already seen the colourful Park Guell with its trencadis mosaics that looked like ceramic meenakari. We saw no reason to get off the bus at the incomplete and dusty grey church, until we asked a person emerging from the church whether it was worth going in. She was so emphatic that we went in, despite our hunger and heat.
 
It was such an awe-inspiring experience that we booked a private tour when we returned to Barcelona in 2016.
 
In the six years since we’d seen the temple, a lot had changed. It’s definitely nearer to its projected finish date of 2027.

Stained glass windows inside the church

 
When Gaudí took over the project, he radically transformed the original architect’s initial simpler plans, conceiving a monumental Gothic church of gigantic and unheard-of dimensions that formed a Bible in stone on the outside, and a naturalist feel on the inside. Once completed, the church will have five naves. There will be a covered walkway around the main worship area, with an additional area containing seven chapels in the north. As funds come together, work starts and stops and there is constantly an area somewhere where building work is ongoing.
 
Despite that, the space is so big that you find peace. Inside, the staircases resemble ammonite mollusks and the pillars resemble an interlaced forest of sequoia trees with light pouring in from small holes above. They stand on a tortoise and turtle, representing both the earth and the sea.

An internal view of the church with columns that look like redwood trees

 
Except for stained glass windows and a single figure in the centre of the huge chapel of Christ on the Cross, there used to be very little decoration that added to the feeling of praying amidst nature. Aspects of this have now changed, as the Temple grows. There are now coloured circles in the roof that look like bottle caps. But the figure of Jesus Christ is arresting. Gaudí worked from live models, making a worker climb onto a cross and hang from it so that he could study how a human body would actually look if it was crucified.
 
He did this outside the building as well. Into an exterior that looks like a rocky mountain filled with fantastical geometrical shapes, there are all the stories from Jesus’ life. The sculpture of a donkey that Mary sits on in Nativity façade looks rather sleepy. That’s because Gaudí drugged a real donkey and used it as a model.
 
In his footsteps, Japanese stonecutter turned architect Etsuro Sotoo created angel musicians with the faces of Japanese children. In the Passion Façade, the Roman guards standing behind Jesus as he hangs on the cross became the inspiration for the Imperial Stormtroopers in the Under construction for over a century, La Sagrada Família, Barcelona’s
best-known landmark, may finally be completed in 2027, films, after George Lucas visited the church in the 1970s.
 
There are three façades at La Sagrada Família, and the Nativity Façade was completed by Gaudí himself. He left behind designs for the rest of the building that included 18 spires, representing, in ascending order of height, the Twelve Apostles, the Virgin Mary, the four Evangelists and, tallest of all, Jesus Christ.
 
But he decreed that the height of the Temple would be 170 metres (560 feet) so that it would always be one metre less than Montjuïc hill in the centre of Barcelona. Gaudí believed that his creation should not surpass God’s.

Antoni Gaudí giving explanations to the bishop of Barcelona and other members of the clergy in 1915

 
Unfortunately, Gaudí refused to work with blue prints, preferring to use his imagination and memory instead, and the construction of La Sagrada Família had to be halted after his death, not least because he was reviled and forgotten.
 
Other models and designs were destroyed during the Spanish Civil War in 1936 when the crypt and Gaudí’s workshop were partly burnt. But Salvador Dali and other artists fronted a revival of Gaudí’s works and later architects tried to use the existing plans to piece together how he would have wanted the Temple to look.
 
The workshop below the church gives a fascinating glimpse into how Gaudí’s plans for Sagrada Família changed over time from the simple to the fantastical. There’s even a 3D machine that’s producing replacements and fresh parts as construction continues towards the 2027 deadline.
 
But the church has new problems to face. The space that was meant to be used as a park in front of the yet-to-be-constructed entrance now has apartments. There’s also a high-speed train line planned not six feet from the final Façade.
 
It’ll be interesting to see how God solves these problems in the way of his church building that has been called everything from “one of the most hideous buildings in the world” to the “most extraordinary personal interpretation of Gothic architecture since the Middle Ages”.