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The Sagrada Família
THE BASILICA IN THE EIXAMPLE

Sagrada Família: the basilica Gaudí left unfinished

The Basílica de la Sagrada Família is a church that took more than a century and a half to raise, and its great central tower reached full height in 2026. It is the one building in Barcelona that explains the whole city's appetite for the unfinished and the ambitious.

Photo: Dbascones, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

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Sagrada Família: the basilica Gaudí left unfinished

What you are looking at

Eixample

Looking up into the vaults of the Sagrada Família, where the columns branch like trees.
Looking up into the vaults of the Sagrada Família, where the columns branch like trees.Maksim Sokolov (maxergon.com), Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
  1. 1
    Nativity façadeThe east front Gaudí supervised himself, crowded with carved plants, animals and a Tree of Life above the central door.
  2. 2
    Passion façadeThe west front, bare and angular on purpose, carved by Josep Maria Subirachs to look like the bones of a skeleton.
  3. 3
    Glory façadeThe south front, begun in 2002, with doors that carry the Lord's Prayer in Catalan and in fifty languages.
  4. 4
    Forest of columnsInterior columns that branch like trees and change from a square base to an octagon, then a circle, as they rise.
  5. 5
    The towersEighteen spires were designed for the Apostles, Evangelists, Mary and Jesus Christ; the central Tower of Jesus Christ stands over 172 meters.
  6. 6
    The cryptWhere the building began in 1882, and where Gaudí is buried.

Reading the place

The sight in full

Why it is not a cathedral

The Sagrada Família is often called a cathedral, but it is not one. The seat of the Archdiocese of Barcelona is the Cathedral of the Holy Cross and Saint Eulalia in the Gothic Quarter. This building is a basilica, a rank Pope Benedict XVI conferred when he consecrated it on 7 November 2010. Its full name is the Basílica i Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família, and the word expiatory matters: it was conceived as a temple funded entirely by donations, offered in atonement.

The vaults of the Sagrada Família seen from below, where the columns branch like trees.
The vaults of the Sagrada Família seen from below, where the columns branch like trees.Maksim Sokolov (maxergon.com), Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

The idea came from a bookseller, Josep Maria Bocabella, who founded a devotional association to Saint Joseph. After a visit to the Vatican in 1872 he returned from Italy wanting a church modeled on the basilica at Loreto. Building started on 19 March 1882, the feast of Saint Joseph, with the crypt of the apse, to a conventional Gothic Revival design by the architect Francisco de Paula del Villar.

Gaudí takes over

Villar resigned in March 1883 and Antoni Gaudí assumed responsibility for the design, which he changed radically. He began work that November and was appointed architect director in March 1884. He kept the Gothic skeleton of a cathedral plan but rethought almost everything else, drawing on the curved forms of Catalan Modernism and on geometry he worked out with hanging chain models.

The carved stone of the Nativity façade of the Sagrada Família seen from below, with cranes at the top.
The carved stone of the Nativity façade of the Sagrada Família seen from below, with cranes at the top.Maksim Sokolov (maxergon.com), Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

Gaudí gave the rest of his life to the project and is buried in the crypt. When he died in 1926, struck by a tram, the building was somewhere between fifteen and twenty-five percent complete. He is said to have remarked that his client was not in a hurry. Money was the reason: the basilica depended on private donations, and work moved at the pace of the gifts.

War, fire and a long rebuild

In July 1936, during the Spanish Civil War, anarchists set fire to the crypt and broke into the workshop, destroying much of Gaudí's original plans and plaster models. Work resumed after 1939 with what had survived and with what could be reconstructed from published plans and photographs. The present design is therefore partly a reconstruction, a fact that has fueled argument for decades; in 2008 a group of well-known Catalan architects even urged that construction be halted out of respect for what Gaudí actually left.

The Sagrada Família rising among the city's rooftops, with the sea behind.
The Sagrada Família rising among the city's rooftops, with the sea behind.Radek Kucharski from Warsaw, Poland, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0

Builders carried on regardless. Since 1940 a line of architects has directed the work, among them Francesc Quintana, Isidre Puig Boada, Lluís Bonet i Garí and Francesc Cardoner, and since 2012 Jordi Faulí. In the 1980s Jordi Bonet began bringing computers into the design and construction process, and today stone is shaped off site by numerically controlled milling machines, where in the twentieth century it was carved by hand.

Three façades, three moods

The church is designed with three great façades. The Nativity façade faces the rising sun to the northeast and was built between 1893 and 1936, so it carries the most direct Gaudí influence. It is divided into three porticoes for Hope, Faith and Charity, and it teems with life: two tortoises, one for land and one for sea, sit at the base of the columns, and two chameleons stand for change. Above the central door rises a Tree of Life. Some of its statues were destroyed in 1936 and later reconstructed by the Japanese sculptor Etsuro Sotoo.

Looking up the nave of the Sagrada Família, where the columns branch toward a stained-glass window.
Looking up the nave of the Sagrada Família, where the columns branch toward a stained-glass window.Maksim Sokolov (maxergon.com), Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

The Passion façade faces the setting sun and could hardly be more different. Following drawings Gaudí made in 1917, builders began it in 1954 and finished its four steeples in 1976; Josep Maria Subirachs began the sculpture in 1987. Its characters are spare and tormented, its six inclined columns resemble strained muscles, and its pediment of eighteen bone-shaped columns ends in a cross with a crown of thorns. Gaudí wanted the onlooker to feel fear, and he wanted harsh light and hard shadow to do part of the work. Carved into the stone is a magic square derived from a famous 1514 print, adjusted so its rows add up to thirty-three.

A carved stone spire of the Nativity façade, seen from the tower with the city far below.
A carved stone spire of the Nativity façade, seen from the tower with the city far below.Maksim Sokolov (maxergon.com), Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

The Glory façade faces south, the sun at its zenith, and will be the principal entrance. Construction began in 2002. It is meant to show the road to God through death, judgment and glory, with a staircase over Carrer de Mallorca that will be lined with images of vice. The bronze doors by Subirachs were installed in September 2008; they carry the Lord's Prayer in Catalan in high relief, and a plea for daily bread in fifty languages.

Inside: a forest of stone

The plan is a Latin cross with five aisles. The nave vaults rise forty-five meters, the side naves thirty, the central crossing sixty and the apse seventy-five, a graduated climb Gaudí arranged so that a visitor standing at the main entrance could see the nave, crossing and apse vaults together. There are practically no flat surfaces and no exact right angles.

Sculpted figures in angular stone on the Passion façade.
Sculpted figures in angular stone on the Passion façade.Berthold Werner, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

The columns are the heart of it. They branch like trees to carry their load, and their shape is the result of intersecting twisting forms: a square base turns into an octagon as the shaft rises, then into a sixteen-sided form, and finally a circle. Gaudí studied acoustics and light as carefully as structure, and the effect inside is of a stone forest filtered through colored glass, brighter and calmer than the carved clamor of the façades outside.

The towers and the record

Gaudí planned eighteen spires, in ascending order of height for the twelve Apostles, the four Evangelists, the Virgin Mary and, tallest of all, Jesus Christ. The Evangelists' spires carry their traditional symbols: a winged bull for Luke, a winged man for Matthew, an eagle for John and a winged lion for Mark. The lower spires are crowned with communion hosts, sheaves of wheat, chalices and bunches of grapes. A seven-meter, twelve-pointed illuminated crystal star was installed on the tower of the Virgin Mary in November 2021.

The city seen from a tower of the basilica, with the Torre Glòries on the skyline.
The city seen from a tower of the basilica, with the Torre Glòries on the skyline.Artem Lepesin, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

The central Tower of Jesus Christ reached structural completion on 20 February 2026, when the last piece was installed, and Pope Leo XIV blessed it on 10 June 2026, a date chosen to coincide with the centenary of Gaudí's death. At a little over 172 meters it makes the Sagrada Família the tallest church in the world, ahead of Ulm Minster in Germany. Gaudí is said to have kept it a meter lower than Montjuïc, the hill that rises above the city, because he did not want his creation to outdo God's. Work on the interior of the tower and on the Glory façade continues, so the basilica remains a building site.

Reading the building from the street

Walk once around the outside before you step in. Start at the Nativity façade, where there is the most to find, then cross to the Passion façade and notice how the two fronts argue with each other. The covered passage that rings the church, an unusual rectangle that threads through the narthex of each portal, is a Gaudí invention that distinguishes the plan from the Spanish cathedrals it otherwise resembles, Burgos, León and Seville.

The basilica's towers behind cranes, with visitors in the street below.
The basilica's towers behind cranes, with visitors in the street below.Chabe01, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

The lake across the street, seen in the photograph that opens this page, is the best place to take in the towers together. Since 2013 high-speed trains have passed through a tunnel under the center of Barcelona close to the basilica. The basilica also holds an international Mass open to the public on Sundays and holy days; its own website gives the arrangements.

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