Gaudí’s Sagrada Família finally shakes off its ‘incompletable’ tag, as Pope prepares to inaugurate its tallest tower – The Art Newspaper

Antoni Gaudí’s Sagrada Família is finally shedding the cranes that have clustered around its towers for well over a century. Probably the world’s most famous unfinished building, the basilica has been under construction for 144 years.

On 10 June, the centennial of Gaudí’s death, Pope Leo XIV is due to bless the Tower of Jesus Christ, completed in February, at a mass. Spain’s prime minister Pedro Sanchez will be among those in attendance. The inauguration marks the symbolic completion of the church, though work is expected to continue for another decade.

For Mateu Hernández, the chief executive officer of Visit Barcelona, who was born and raised in the city, to see the Sagrada Família finished is to witness history. “We are a lucky generation,” he says, comparing the experience to that of Parisians who saw the unveiling of the Eiffel Tower, or Indians who saw the newly completed Taj Mahal.

He says his own surprise at the completion of the Tower of Jesus Christ took him aback. “It was always there, germinating, slowly growing, being part of our lives since the beginning, but then it’s like seeing it for the first time. You’re going down the Diagonal and whoa! There it is. You go up on your building’s rooftop and whoa! There it is again.”

The newly completed tower is the basilica’s 14th, with the building due to eventually feature a total of 18. Twelve of the towers completed so far are dedicated to the apostles, four to the gospels and one to the Virgin Mary (completed in 2021 and crowned by a star), while the Tower of Jesus is the central lantern tower, topped by a four-arm cross made of glass and white ceramic meant to shine day and night, as Gaudí expressly wished.

The Sagrada Família’s construction began in 1882 under the architect Francisco de Paula del Villar, who had planned an expiatory temple in a Gothic Revival style. Less than a year later, Gaudí, then 30, took over and remade the project entirely. He considered nature to be God’s greatest creation and envisaged a temple more akin to a forest than a traditional man-made church, with columns branching like trees and geometries found in the natural world. When he presented the new plans to the parish, he undertook to complete its construction within ten years. He would spend the rest of his life revising that estimate upwards. “My client is not in a rush,” he famously said, referring to God.

Catalan Modernism

Gaudí’s religious fervour deepened with age and, in the meantime, he produced the masterpieces that would cement his status not only as the pioneer of Catalan Modernism but as a genius in his own right, including the Park Güell, the Casa Batlló and La Pedrera. His work stands out among Barcelona’s tidy blocks known as cuadras—a grid-like urban layout so unlike the labyrinthine streets of many other European capitals. He ultimately moved into an atelier inside the basilica and died in 1926 from injuries sustained after being struck by a tram. He was buried in the church’s crypt, 44 years after construction began, with only a quarter of the work finished.

In the decades after his death, the project stalled. The Spanish Civil War halted construction between 1936 and 1939, and anarchist groups destroyed most of the designs and models Gaudí had left behind. Work resumed in the 1950s, with a new generation of craftsmen, architects and engineers reconstructing Gaudí’s intentions from photographs, plaster models and memory.

Joan Barbany i Verdaguer, born in 1884, was the first of the Barbany family of stonemasons who worked on the temple. “He began working in granite quarries in the 19th century, breaking up blocks for those working on site,” says his grandson, Jordi Barbany. From then on, his family continued the work, with more elaborate pieces commissioned from the 1990s onwards, including columns, sculptures and gargoyles.

For the craftworkers tasked with realising it, Gaudí’s vision was above all a practical challenge. “We dreamed about Gaudí many times because of the ordeal of dealing with such difficult work,” Barbany jokes. “Without speaking to him, we had to understand what he wanted.”

The company bought its first robot in 2003. Now Jordi’s son, Arnau, has joined the family business and brought in state-of-the-art software. “The challenge is to do what Gaudí wanted as quickly and efficiently as possible, using current technology, without losing the essence of the handcrafted piece,” Jordi explains. He believes the architect was fortunate to be able to count on a highly reputed crafts school in Catalonia. “Without these artisans around him, he would not have been able to do it, and would have had to imagine something else.”

Symbolic completion notwithstanding, construction on the Sagrada Família will continue for at least another decade. What still remains to be built is principally the Glory Façade on the south side of the basilica, which will feature four towers, as well as a monumental staircase and park leading to the temple. When Gaudí drew his design, nothing stood in their way, but more than a century later, two residential blocks would have to be demolished if the plan is to be executed, which would be a controversial move in a city already grappling with a severe housing crisis.

In a statement to The Art Newspaper, Barcelona’s city council acknowledges the exact number of affected neighbours has yet to be defined, though estimates hover at around 200. The council says it is maintaining “an open dialogue to seek a solution, including the possible relocation to a site already acquired by the Construction Board on the same street”. No dates have been announced.

A reluctant icon

The basilica now stands as Barcelona’s undisputed icon, though Hernández calls it a “reluctant” one. “When you compare it to other great icons of architecture from the last 20, 30 years, you notice that these are all feats of engineering racing to be the tallest, the strangest, the curviest buildings. These are good ambitions, but they don’t stand the test of time,” he says.

The completion of the Tower of Jesus Christ in February made the Sagrada Família the tallest church in the world but, for Gaudí, engineering prowess was not an aim in itself. Standing 172.5 metres tall, the tower stops just short of the nearby Montjuïc hill’s 177 metres, complying with Gaudí’s belief that no work of man must seek to surpass the work of God. His piety put him on the path to sainthood in April 2025, when Pope Francis declared him “venerable”, though Leo XIV has not yet revealed his stance on the process. The next distinction—“blessed”, the last step before sainthood itself—requires the performance of a verifiable miracle that is attributable to Gaudí’s intercession.

Noelia, 26, lives a minute from the basilica’s entrance. She has been inside just once, on a school trip, and signs up faithfully to ticket raffles. “I would definitely love to visit, but I can’t afford the ticket,” she says. Tickets to visit the church cost a steep €26 per adult.

For most of its history, the Sagrada Família depended entirely on public donations, but tourism has changed that, and the building is now funded almost entirely through ticket sales. In 2025, the basilica welcomed a record 4.87 million visitors, generating €134.5m in revenue, €58.4m of which went into funding its construction. In a 2018 agreement, Barcelona city council formalised its civic obligations, committing €36m over ten years toward public transport, street improvements, accessibility and the additional services that come with hosting Spain’s most visited monument.

Montse Gelonch, another neighbour, first visited the church on a school trip, and was transfixed by a sculptor working on the figures of the Passion Façade. She now marvels at the temple from her terrace.

“We are living the construction of a basilica in real time—and they don’t build these nowadays.”

For her, the Sagrada Família is more than a landmark. “You can now see it from so many points. It anchors you to the city. You see it and you think: this place belongs to me, and I belong to this place.”