Sagrada Família

The first four stops are outside, the next four inside, and the last two are about the man and about the same years elsewhere.

1. The Nativity façade: the one Gaudí finished

Gaudí chose to build this front first. He reasoned that a joyful façade would persuade the city to go on paying for the rest. Work on it ran from 1894 to 1930.

There are three doorways, for Hope, Charity and Faith. In the middle the Holy Family sits under a star, and above the door rises a green cypress covered with white doves.

Gaudí wanted real things. He made plaster casts of living plants, chickens and donkeys, and of local people, for his sculptors to copy.

Many of the figures you see were carved after his death. The fifteen angels playing instruments and the singing children are by Etsuro Sotoo, a Japanese sculptor who came here in 1978 and never left.

2. The Passion façade: bones and a number square

Gaudí drew this front in 1911, while he lay ill, and wanted it hard and frightening. The sculptor Josep Maria Subirachs carved it between 1987 and 2009. The story runs in an S from the Last Supper at lower left to the burial at the top.

The helmets of the Roman soldiers copy the chimneys on the roof of La Pedrera, an apartment block Gaudí built across town. It is the sculptor's salute to the architect.

Beside the kiss of Judas is a square of sixteen numbers. Every row, column and diagonal adds up to 33, the age of Christ at his death.

The bronze doors carry the Gospel account of the Passion in raised letters, eight thousand of them. A few words are polished gold.

3. The towers: eighteen planned, fourteen standing

Gaudí planned eighteen towers. Twelve are for the apostles, four on each façade. Four are for the evangelists. One is for the Virgin Mary, and the tallest, in the centre, is for Jesus Christ.

Mary's tower, 138 metres, was topped with a star of glass in December 2021. The four evangelists' towers were finished in 2023. The cross was set on the Tower of Jesus Christ on 20 February 2026, and Pope Leo XIV blessed it on 10 June 2026, a hundred years to the day after Gaudí died.

At 172.5 metres it passes the spire of Ulm Minster in Germany, which had been the tallest church since 1890. Gaudí kept it just lower than Montjuïc, the hill above the harbour. The work of man, he said, should not rise above the work of God.

Look at the tips of the lower pinnacles. They end in baskets of fruit in coloured mosaic: oranges, grapes, figs, chestnuts.

4. The Glory façade: the front door that is not there yet

The main entrance will face south, towards the sea. It will be the largest façade, and its subject is the road to God: death, judgement, glory. Building has begun; the towers above it have not.

Gaudí's plan gives it a wide stairway running out over the street. Blocks of flats now stand where the stairs would go. Whether and how they will be cleared is being argued between the church, the city and the people who live there.

5. Inside: a forest of stone

Gaudí disliked the buttresses that hold up Gothic cathedrals from outside. He called them crutches. He wanted a building that stood by itself.

So the columns lean. Each one is tilted along the line of the load it carries, and near the top it splits into branches that each take a piece of the vault. The hardest stone goes where the weight is greatest: dark red porphyry for the four columns at the crossing, then basalt, granite, and sandstone at the edges.

Look straight up. The vault is 45 metres above the floor in the nave and 60 at the crossing. The round openings between the branches let daylight down like gaps in leaves.

The nave was roofed only in 2010. On 7 November that year Pope Benedict XVI consecrated the church, and Mass could be said in it for the first time.

6. The glass: cold in the morning, warm in the afternoon

The windows are by the Catalan painter Joan Vila-Grau, who began them in 1999. On the Nativity side, where the sun rises, they are blue and green. On the Passion side, where it sets, they are orange and red.

The upper windows are almost clear. Gaudí wanted colour low down, where people are, and white light high up to show the vault.

Come about two hours before sunset on a clear day. The whole west side burns.

7. The crypt and Gaudí's grave

Under the apse is the oldest part, the crypt, begun in 1882 by the first architect in an ordinary Gothic style. Gaudí finished it and is buried in it, in the chapel of Our Lady of Mount Carmel.

On 7 June 1926 he was walking to evening prayers when a tram hit him. He was 73, thin, and carelessly dressed, with no papers in his pockets. People took him for a beggar, and it was some time before anyone would take him to a hospital. He died three days later. Half of Barcelona followed the coffin here.

Ten years later, in July 1936, the Civil War began. Anti-clerical militants set fire to the crypt and to Gaudí's workshop. His drawings burned and his plaster models were smashed.

8. The museum and the schoolhouse: how he worked it out

Gaudí did not trust drawings. He built models. To find the shape of an arch that would stand without props, he hung chains from a board and looked at them in a mirror: a hanging chain turned upside down is a perfect arch.

The broken models were pieced together after the war, and they are still the main guide. Today the shapes are worked out on computers and many of the stones are cut by machine. That is why the last forty years have gone faster than the first hundred.

The low building with the wavy roof is the school Gaudí built in 1909 for the children of his workmen. The walls and roof are thin brick, and they are strong because they curve. The architect Le Corbusier came in 1928 and drew it in his notebook.

9. The man

Antoni Gaudí was born in 1852, the son of a coppersmith. He never married. In his last years he gave up every other job, and in 1925 he moved into his workshop on the site. He went from door to door asking for money for the building.

Asked how long it would take, he is said to have answered: "My client is not in a hurry."

Seven of his buildings in and near Barcelona are on the World Heritage list, among them the crypt and Nativity façade of this church. In April 2025 Pope Francis declared him "Venerable", a step on the way to being named a saint.

Not everyone has wanted it finished. In 2008 some four hundred architects and artists signed a letter asking for the work to stop, on the ground that what is being built is no longer Gaudí's.

The Japanese director Hiroshi Teshigahara made a film with almost no words, Antonio Gaudí (1984), that ends on this building. Dan Brown set the last chapters of his novel Origin (2017) inside it.

10. The same years in China, and other long buildings

When the first stone was laid in 1882, China was in the eighth year of the Guangxu Emperor of the Qing (1644–1912). When Gaudí died in June 1926, the Northern Expedition was about to set out from Guangzhou.

A hundred and forty years is long but not a record. Cologne Cathedral in Germany took 632 years, with a gap of three centuries. The Giant Buddha at Leshan in Sichuan took ninety, from 713 to 803, and outlived the monk who began it.

Gaudí built no building in China. Yet his way of finding form in nature has a Chinese echo: the scholar's rocks and garden rockeries of Suzhou are also chosen because they look as if no hand had shaped them.