Description
Sagrada Família is Barcelona's great basilica, designed by Antoni Gaudí and still being finished more than a century after he took it over: towers like stone honeycombs, façades crawling with carved plants and animals, and an interior like a forest turned to stone. It is the tallest church in the world.
Begin outside with the Nativity façade, the one Gaudí saw rise. Its three portals, for Hope, Faith and Charity, teem with scenes drawn from nature, and at the foot of the two great columns sit a turtle and a tortoise, one for the land and one for the sea.
The Passion façade on the other side could not be more different: bare, angular, with leaning columns shaped like strained muscles and an upper pediment of bone-like shafts. Its tormented figures were carved from 1987 by a team led by Josep Maria Subirachs, and people still argue about them.
Inside, the forest of columns branches like trees to hold up vaults 45 meters high in the central nave. Each column begins square and turns into an octagon, then sixteen sides, then a circle, so hardly a surface is flat. Gaudí also planned the heights to rise step by step, nave, crossing and apse, all visible from the entrance.
The spires are the signature. Gaudí planned eighteen, for the Twelve Apostles, the four Evangelists, the Virgin Mary and, tallest of all, Jesus Christ. The Evangelists' towers carry a winged bull, man, eagle and lion at the top, and the lower ones end in Venetian-glass mosaics.
The planned Glory façade, the main entrance, will be the largest of the three. Its central doors by Subirachs already carry the Our Father in Catalan, with the words "Give us this day our daily bread" in fifty languages.
Down in the crypt lies Gaudí's tomb. He gave the church the rest of his life, and when he died in 1926, run over by a tram, less than a quarter of it stood. "My client is not in a hurry," he is said to have joked.
It all began with a bookseller, Josep Maria Bocabella, who dreamed of an "expiatory temple" paid for entirely by donations. Work started in 1882 on a conventional neo-Gothic plan. When the first architect resigned a year later, Gaudí took over and changed everything.
In 1936 anarchists set fire to the crypt and broke into his workshop, destroying plans and models. His successors rebuilt the design from fragments and photographs, and from the 1980s computers took over the stone carving once done by hand.
The central Tower of Jesus Christ was completed in 2026, a century after Gaudí's death, and reaches 172.5 meters. That is a little less than the hill of Montjuïc: Gaudí believed that no work of man should surpass God's.
Don't miss
• The Nativity façade.
• The Passion façade.
• The forest of columns inside.
• Gaudí's tomb in the crypt.
Did you know?
• George Orwell called it "one of the most hideous buildings in the world."
• The magic square on the Passion façade adds up to 33 in every row, not the usual 34.
• Since 2018 part of its stone has come from a quarry in England, near Chorley.
Begin outside with the Nativity façade, the one Gaudí saw rise. Its three portals, for Hope, Faith and Charity, teem with scenes drawn from nature, and at the foot of the two great columns sit a turtle and a tortoise, one for the land and one for the sea.
The Passion façade on the other side could not be more different: bare, angular, with leaning columns shaped like strained muscles and an upper pediment of bone-like shafts. Its tormented figures were carved from 1987 by a team led by Josep Maria Subirachs, and people still argue about them.
Inside, the forest of columns branches like trees to hold up vaults 45 meters high in the central nave. Each column begins square and turns into an octagon, then sixteen sides, then a circle, so hardly a surface is flat. Gaudí also planned the heights to rise step by step, nave, crossing and apse, all visible from the entrance.
The spires are the signature. Gaudí planned eighteen, for the Twelve Apostles, the four Evangelists, the Virgin Mary and, tallest of all, Jesus Christ. The Evangelists' towers carry a winged bull, man, eagle and lion at the top, and the lower ones end in Venetian-glass mosaics.
The planned Glory façade, the main entrance, will be the largest of the three. Its central doors by Subirachs already carry the Our Father in Catalan, with the words "Give us this day our daily bread" in fifty languages.
Down in the crypt lies Gaudí's tomb. He gave the church the rest of his life, and when he died in 1926, run over by a tram, less than a quarter of it stood. "My client is not in a hurry," he is said to have joked.
It all began with a bookseller, Josep Maria Bocabella, who dreamed of an "expiatory temple" paid for entirely by donations. Work started in 1882 on a conventional neo-Gothic plan. When the first architect resigned a year later, Gaudí took over and changed everything.
In 1936 anarchists set fire to the crypt and broke into his workshop, destroying plans and models. His successors rebuilt the design from fragments and photographs, and from the 1980s computers took over the stone carving once done by hand.
The central Tower of Jesus Christ was completed in 2026, a century after Gaudí's death, and reaches 172.5 meters. That is a little less than the hill of Montjuïc: Gaudí believed that no work of man should surpass God's.
Don't miss
• The Nativity façade.
• The Passion façade.
• The forest of columns inside.
• Gaudí's tomb in the crypt.
Did you know?
• George Orwell called it "one of the most hideous buildings in the world."
• The magic square on the Passion façade adds up to 33 in every row, not the usual 34.
• Since 2018 part of its stone has come from a quarry in England, near Chorley.