Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia Nears Completion After Nearly 100 Years of Construction

While the towers of Notre-Dame de Paris have just reopened to the public after five years of restoration, another tower is set to make headlines in the coming months. Specifically, the eighteenth tower of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, which should be completed next year, marking the end (or near-end) of construction work on one of Europe’s most time-consuming monuments.

June 1926-June 2026

It will have taken a full century for the construction site of one of Spain’s most famous landmarks to reach its final phase. But the task has been immense, given how imposing and intricate the basilica remains in its volumes and forms. And most importantly, things simply couldn’t have happened any other way…

Stunning and majestic, yet sometimes controversial, the Sagrada Familia began construction in 1882, blending Gothic style, Art Nouveau, and extravagant creations over time, with countless magnificent architectural details both outside—with its spire reaching toward the sky—and inside, where superb stained glass windows beautifully filter the light.

This is thanks, of course, to Antoni Gaudí, its architect who—as many don’t know—only officially joined the project one year after construction began. Nonetheless, the two remain forever inseparable for this basilica that would become his life’s work. And in some way, his death’s work too, when Gaudí died on June 10, 1926, struck by a Barcelona streetcar.

Naturally, there was strong temptation to complete the last of the Sagrada Familia’s 18 towers exactly one century later, to mark the centenary of his death and the festivities planned for the occasion. Especially since this is the Tower of Jesus Christ, the tallest if not the most beautiful of the edifice at 172.5 meters (566 feet).

This would mark the end of construction, or nearly so, since delays caused partly by Covid mean the project will still require several more years of work before we can say that Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia is finally and definitively complete. This will bring great joy to the 4 million visitors the site welcomes each year.

Gaudí : A Life and His Works

Antoni Gaudí remains one of history’s most remarkable architects. Born in June 1852 in Reus, southern Catalonia, he came from a modest family. This didn’t prevent him from moving to Barcelona and being admitted to the School of Architecture in 1874, before opening his own studio four years later. Though his beginnings were difficult, they caught the attention of Güell, an important Barcelona industrialist who would become his principal patron and enable him to participate in increasingly ambitious architectural projects. So much so that in 1883, he was appointed head of the Sagrada Familia construction.

Fame and contracts followed, culminating between 1900 and 1910 when he demonstrated the full measure of his talent with splendid works like Park Güell, the Bellesguard residence, Casa Batlló, La Pedrera, and others. This collection of achievements magnificently showcases his brilliant inventiveness and makes the architect an incomparable avant-gardist who, even today, remains the only person in the world with seven of his works inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage List.

From 1914 onwards, he devoted himself exclusively to the Sagrada Familia, always considering it his masterpiece. He worked on every detail so that it would blend into the symbolic harmony he envisioned for it. It’s there, in the Carmen chapel of the Sagrada Familia, that he rests today following his accident and death on June 10, 1926.

> Infos : sagradafamilia.org