History of the Sagrada Família

The first stone of the Sagrada Família was laid on March 19, 1882. One hundred and forty-four years later, the temple is still not finished, which makes it a rarity: it is the oldest construction project in Europe that is still underway, adhering to the original design. The question that almost everyone asks, why is it taking so long, has an answer that lies not in the architecture, but in the money.

The Sagrada Família is an atonement temple. That word, which sounds like a religious technical term, is the key to everything: an atonement temple is built solely with donations, without public money and without money from the diocese. For decades, the pace of the construction literally depended on how much was collected that year. Today, it depends on the entrance fees from visitors, which is the same logic with a different source. Jordi Faulí, the architect who has been leading the project since 2012, summarizes it this way: "The construction of the Sagrada Família depends on the people."

The temple was not commissioned by a bishop or a king. It was driven by a bookseller from Barcelona, Josep Maria Bocabella, who in 1866 founded the Spiritual Association of Devotees of Saint Joseph and a magazine to promote it. The association grew to include 600,000 members, and with their donations, it purchased the land: 12,800 square meters in Sant Martí de Provençals, then an independent municipality on the outskirts, for 172,000 pesetas. The deed is dated December 31, 1881.

The first architect was Francisco de Paula del Villar, the diocesan architect, and his project was a textbook example of neo-Gothic architecture: pointed arch windows, buttresses, flying buttresses on the exterior, and a slender bell tower. Work began with the crypt, located beneath the apse. The project lasted just over a year. Villar resigned in 1883, and the official documentation cited "technical disagreements related to the cost of materials" as the reason, which is a polite way of saying that he didn't get along with those who were paying.

The commission was initially offered to Joan Martorell, who rejected it and recommended a former collaborator of his. This is how Antoni Gaudí, at 31 years old and with only five years of professional experience, came to be involved. No one could have known it then, but he had just accepted the project that would define the rest of his life.

The first thing he did was to renovate what was already in progress. In the Villar crypt, he raised the vaults, replaced the austere capitals with others inspired by plant motifs, enlarged the windows, and ordered the excavation of a moat around it to allow light and air to enter. This detail, which often goes unnoticed today, explains why the crypt doesn's feel like a basement. He also removed the central staircase leading down and replaced it with two spiral staircases on the sides, to create a clear view of the altar. Almost nothing from the original Neo-Gothic design survived.

Gaudí worked on the temple between 1883 and 1926. In 1891, work began on the facade of the Nativity, the one that faces Marina Street, and in 1914, he gave up all other projects to dedicate himself solely to this one. In his final years, he practically lived within the workshop of the construction site, and in November 1925, he moved there permanently, to a room with a bed.

On June 7, 1926, in the late afternoon, a tram struck Gaudí at the intersection of Gran Via and Bailèn. He was walking towards the church of Sant Felip Neri, as he did every day. He was wearing old clothes and did not have any identification on him, so they mistook him for a homeless person, and it took some time for him to receive attention. He was first taken to the first aid station on Ronda de Sant Pere and then to the Hospital de la Santa Creu. When someone suggested moving him to a clinic, he replied that his place was there, among the poor. He died three days later, on June 10, 1926, at the age of 73. The funeral, on June 12, crossed half of Barcelona, and he was buried in the crypt of the temple he had built.

Ten years later, during the early days of the Spanish Civil War, the workshop of the Sagrada Família was raided and set on fire. It is important to be precise about what happened, because it is often misrepresented: the blueprints and photographs burned; the plaster models were not burned, they were destroyed. The difference determines the rest of the story. A burned blueprint disappears; a broken model leaves fragments.

The fact that the work could continue is due to two things that happened almost by chance. The first is that Francesc de Paula Quintana, a collaborator of Gaudí, went down among the rubble to collect, clean the soot from, and classify thousands of pieces of plaster, with which a large part of the models were reconstructed. The second is that, in the ten years that passed between Gaudí's death and the fire, the collaborators had published the most important plans. What was burning in the workshop had already been printed elsewhere.

This is where a lasting consequence arises: the workshop of model makers at the basilica still uses Gaudí's methods, working with plaster models and ruled surfaces, now incorporating parametric design and 3D printing. The source of the project is not the drawing; it is the model.

The question is uncomfortable, but it is legitimate: how much of what is seen today is by Gaudí? The honest answer is that the crypt, the apse, the façade of the Nativity, and a bell tower are his; the rest was built by eight different teams over a century, interpreting broken models and published plans. UNESCO, in fact, only inscribed the crypt and the façade of the Nativity. This is the sequence, showing what was built in each stage.

The final stage is the one that has changed the skyline of Barcelona. On November 7, 2010, Benedict XVI dedicated the temple to worship and declared it a minor basilica. It is important to remember the title: the Sagrada Família has never been a cathedral, and the cathedral of Barcelona is another church, the one of Santa Creu i Santa Eulàlia, in the old town.

After that, the central towers arrived, one after another. The tower of the Virgin Mary, with its twelve-pointed star, was illuminated on December 8, 2021, reaching a height of 138 meters. The four towers of the Evangelists, each 135 meters tall, were inaugurated on November 12, 2023. And in October 2025, with the installation of the lower arm of the cross, the temple reached 162.91 meters, surpassing the Ulm Minster, which had held the record for the tallest church in the world since 1890.

The final piece was placed on February 20, 2026: the upper arm of the cross, a block measuring 4.5 by 4.5 by 4.9 meters, which brought the tower of Jesus Christ to its final height of 172.5 meters. On June 10th, exactly one hundred years after Gaudí's death, Pope Leo XIV presided over the centennial mass and blessed the tower, which was lit up for the first time that night.

This episode is real and is often told as a funny anecdote, but it actually explains a lot about the relationship between the temple and the city. The building permit was requested in 1885 from the city council of Sant Martí de Provençals, the municipality that Barcelona absorbed in 1897. That request was never resolved, and for decades, no one claimed it.

The matter was settled in 2018 with an agreement between the City Council and the Construction Company, and the permit was formally granted on July 24, 2019. The basilica paid €4,627,074.03 in construction taxes and fees, and committed to contributing €36 million over ten years: €22 million for public transportation, €7 million to study a direct access to the metro, €4 million to revitalize the surrounding streets, and €3 million for the maintenance of public spaces. The figure of 137 years is calculated from 1882; the City Council itself, which calculates from the application of 1885, speaks of "more than 130" years.

With the Jesucristo tower closed from the outside, there are 14 towers built out of the 18 planned. The four bell towers of the facade of the Glory are missing, which is the main facade and the one that Gaudí oriented towards the sea; its portico is also missing, as well as the baptistery, the chapel of Penance, and a significant portion of the surrounding cloister. The work inside the tower continues, and it is scheduled to continue until 2027 and 2028.

But the real obstacle is not constructive. It is the escalinata de la Gloria (Stairway of Glory). To overcome the four-meter difference in elevation between Provença and Mallorca streets, Gaudí designed, around 1916, a staircase with an elevated bridge over the road. Building it would involve demolishing part of two blocks between Mallorca and Aragó streets, and that is where the project has been stuck since the Metropolitan General Plan of 1976 reserved that space. The council speaks of potentially up to a thousand homes affected; a municipal hypothesis that reduced the staircase from 60 to 40 meters wide reduced the number of relocations to 171. These are two figures that measure different scenarios, not a contradiction. The council's own CEO assumes that the matter will end up in court.

That's why the answer to "when will it be finished?" is that there is no set date. And this isn's the first time a completion date has been promised; the list of unfulfilled predictions is quite long.