The 140-year struggle of the Sagrada Família – will it ever be finished?

When Pope Leo XIV visits the Sagrada Família in Barcelona on June 10, he will mark the 100th anniversary of its creator’s death. Antoni Gaudí, an enigmatic Catalan architect, died aged 73 from injuries suffered when he absent-mindedly stepped in front of a tram. Passers-by mistook his shabby dress and general dishevelment to mean he was homeless; he breathed his last in a vagrants’ hospital.

Such a bizarre ending has only added to Gaudí’s subsequent myth. Unlike today’s headline-grabbing cohort of “starchitects” – the likes of Frank Gehry, Norman Foster and Renzo Piano – the solitary Gaudí only travelled outside Spain twice and seldom left his beloved Catalonia, where he’d been born in the city of Reus. “I do not ask for myself,” he would say when seeking donations for the Sagrada Família. “I am the doorman.”

Gaudí never married or had an intimate relationship. He was ultra-devout (when the tram knocked him down, he was on his daily walk to meet his confessor) and he lived in the most simple of settings, creating beauty but never hankering after it for himself. He deliberately left behind almost no papers, diaries or drawings, as if erasing himself.

Yet the still unfinished Sagrada Família, under construction since 1882, must be the world’s most-visited building site. Five million head there annually. Most of the cranes and scaffolding came down earlier this year, when the last and tallest of its 18 honeycomb towers was finished. At 556ft, the “Jesus Tower” has confirmed the basilica’s status as the tallest church in the world.

So why on earth has it taken so long to approach the completion of a project first announced in 1874? More than a century ago, when asked about its painfully slow genesis, Gaudí would habitually lift his eyes heavenwards, and say: “My client is not in any hurry.” He had come to believe that his work was akin to a vocation; his imagination was fuelled by religious imagery and the majesty of nature, God’s creation.

Yet to point the finger at God was also a case of Gaudí dissembling. (And that isn’t a quality usually associated with saints, whose ranks his supporters hope he will be joining, perhaps as early as when the Pope visits the Sagrada Família.) The real reason was money, or the lack of it, and that remains the case today.

The plan for the Sagrada Família wasn’t even devised by Church authorities. Barcelona already had a magnificent 14th-century cathedral, known locally as La Seu (“the seat”). Instead, it was a pious association of conservative-minded Catholics, founded in 1866, that came up with a plan for the Basilica and Expiatory Church of the Holy Family, as they originally named it; they revealed their ambition in that word “expiatory”, meaning atoning for sins. Their new church, to be built on a site at the eastern end of L’Eixample, the “extension” or new quarter of the city, was to stand as a clarion call for a return to traditional family life, and a rebuttal of a fast-changing and godless world, brought about by rapid industrialisation across Spain and Europe.

La Seu raised funds from subscriptions and donations, which they generated through their newsletters, and their first architect, Francisco del Villar, cut his cloth according to their modest means: he began a dull, conventional, neo-Gothic church. When he walked away a year later after an argument over money, the crypt was only half-built; the association replaced him with Gaudí, five years out of architecture school, where his principal had puzzled aloud over whether he was “a genius or a madman”. They assumed that, in gratitude for the opportunity, the young architect would do their bidding dutifully.

Instead, proving you can be both mad and inspired at the same time, Gaudí made – slowly at first, then gathering pace – a series of major revisions to the plan. He extended the brief to creating a profile so radical that it would dominate the Barcelona skyline.

Defeated by the sums such an upgrade required, the association in the 1890s passed responsibility to the Archdiocese of Barcelona. Initially, the latter pressed Gaudí to scale the whole thing back, setting deadlines in often confrontational meetings, but by this stage, Gaudí was the most sought-after architect in his adopted city. He’d created a series of eye-catching palaces for its industrial elite: Casa Vicens, Casa Calvet, Casa Batlló and Casa Milà are all on today’s tourist itineraries. Stubborn, single-minded and litigious when crossed, he wouldn’t be reined in.

In 1909, aged 57, he abandoned his commercial work altogether to give the Sagrada Família – his only church – his full attention. Tiring of dealing with the vanity, whims and financial controls of the rich, he preferred to have God as a client, though he confided to friends that the Almighty proved even more demanding. Already a near-perfectionist, being watched from on high made Gaudí ever more attentive to detail.

The hundreds of figures you can see today on the Nativity Façade, the first of three great entrances he planned for the basilica, were made individually from real-life models, photographed, then carved by a team of sculptors on site. Gaudí would inspect every one, changing some, abandoning others, instructing many to be started again. He would visit mortuaries to watch dead bodies being dissected, so he could better understand human limbs; he kept animals on the site so his sculptors could learn precisely how a hen or a lamb walked. Progress slowed to a crawl.

In spite of all these efforts, Gaudí was driven into a deep depression by his repeated failure, as he saw it, to recreate divine perfection. His health grew more fragile. There were two enforced rest cures in the Catalan countryside; during one of them, he almost died. He assumed an ever more penitential air, hence those daily journeys to see his confessor.

Real-world events also intervened. In 1909, Barcelona witnessed a pitched battle on the streets, which became known as the Setmana Tràgica: for a week, an alliance of unions and anarchists rose up in protest at military conscription, miserable wages and terrible working conditions, blaming their members’ plight on the wealthy elite, the military and the Church. Convents and churches were torched until the army crushed the rebellion, leaving dead bodies littering the streets.

Watching from his home on the hill behind Barcelona as the smoke rose, Gaudí came to believe that the Sagrada Família could reunite the divided city. Restyling it a “cathedral for the poor” (a phrase he borrowed from his friend, Bishop Josep Torras i Bages) he believed it could bring people back together, and back to God. This proved a naïve aim. The uprising accelerated an economic downturn in Barcelona, which made the task of finding money for the Sagrada Família even more difficult.

With the cash-flow so weak, it took until November 1925 for the first of the basilica’s towers to be completed. Gaudí died the following year. His team of loyal assistants, some of whom had only ever worked for him, took over the project, but achieved little more than finishing the other half-built towers on the Nativity Façade, and failed to start anything new – the nave, the chancel, the roof, the other two façades. The widespread assumption, after more than 40 years, was that the Sagrada Família would never be completed.

Yet, when the Spanish Civil War broke out a decade later, the cathedral was still regarded by anti-clerical Republicans as a sufficiently potent symbol of the Church’s grip on power that they invaded the site and smashed Gaudí’s architectural models, intending to prevent the basilica ever being finished. They even opened his tomb, but held back from disturbing his coffin.

The Second World War followed soon after. Though Spain remained officially neutral, the conflict exacerbated its economic plight; the building site remained silent. Then, in the immediate post-war years, Gaudí’s reputation recovered, with new champions in his fellow Catalan artists Joan Miró and Salvador Dalí. Curious visitors began to return, as part of the Franco government’s push to encourage foreign tourism. In 1952, the Church-run committee that was now in charge of the Sagrada Família, and was charging entrance fees, felt able to announce that work would begin on the second façade, recalling Jesus’s passion and death. Alas, it took until 1985 – 103 years after ground had first been broken – to agree on a sculptor to take on the task.

And then, at last, came the era of mass tourism. In 1990, the city recorded 1.7 million overseas visitors; the 2025 figure was 16 million. The ticket money they paid was a huge boon to the basilica; so was the aid of major donors, who contributed, for example, £110m in 2023 alone. The Japanese have a particular liking for Gaudí – one big donor, it’s rumoured, was Nissan, who had a factory in Barcelona until 2020 – which is rooted in his embrace of nature in his buildings and their spiritual dimension, all strong themes in Japanese aesthetics.

The big remaining problem – by now, a longstanding one – was how to turn what broken fragments remained of Gaudí’s scheme into a plan faithful to his original vision. But while computer-assisted design (CAD) technology supposedly solved it, many have been unimpressed. The distinguished Australian art critic Robert Hughes, for whom Barcelona was a second home and Gaudí a hero, damned the “new” Sagrada Família as “little more than a huge simulacrum, an inert copy of a non-existent original”. It was so kitsch, Hughes said, “that it could have been done by Mormons, not Catholics”.

It’s true that while Gaudí himself was private and modest, his buildings couldn’t be more flamboyant. Yet his extraordinary imagination was firmly rooted in religious imagery and traditions. For instance, the Sagrada Família’s towers were inspired, his young disciple Cèsar Martinell maintained, by the castells – towers of people standing on each other’s shoulders in celebrations to mark saints’ days – that took place in the Catalan countryside of Gaudí’s upbringing. By contrast, critics allege, CAD has injected a touch of Disney.

And the basilica still isn’t finished. Its third and final façade, recalling Christ’s resurrection, is in a state of limbo. Gaudí had planned that it should lead out on to a bridge – “churches are bridges leading to Glory” he once remarked – that would span the adjoining Carrer de Mallorca. But in the 1950s, believing the Sagrada Família would never be completed, the local authority gave its blessing to a block of flats being built on the other side of the road where the bridge would have descended to street level. Today’s residents continue to resist all efforts to evict them and demolish their homes. Cranes remain on site. The dispute is in the courts. The saga never ends.

[Source: Daily Telegraph]