Why is the Sagrada Família taking so long? The story of a church more than a century in the making

You won't find the current state of the works or a finishing date here, as those change: just how it got this far.

How did the Sagrada Família begin?

With a bookseller. Josep Maria Bocabella, deeply devoted to Saint Joseph, had set up a society of Saint Joseph's devotees in 1866. On 31 December 1881 he paid 172,000 pesetas for a 12,800-square-metre plot in Sant Martí de Provençals. The area was known as the Poblet: open fields and a small cluster of low houses.

The idea was an expiatory church, built solely from the alms of the faithful as atonement for the sins of humanity. And there's the first answer: a building that lives on donations moves forward with whatever comes in, and nobody can put a date on money that hasn't been given yet.

The foundation stone was laid on 19 March 1882, Saint Joseph's Day, for a Gothic Revival design by an architect called Villar. A year later Villar left after falling out with Bocabella, and the commission went to an architect barely into his thirties: Antoni Gaudí. Work was just starting on the crypt, the first part to be finished: by 1885 Mass was already being said down there.

How did Gaudí work?

By testing. For the sculpture on the Nativity façade he used real models, people and animals. He'd make a plaster model, have it hoisted up onto the façade to see how it looked from below, and only if he was happy with it was it carved in stone. According to the church itself, he used whoever was to hand: labourers, pilgrims, children from the school on the site and neighbours from the Poblet. They were covered in plaster for a few minutes, and some fainted. A beautiful way to work. And a slow one.

From 1914 he worked on nothing but the church, and in November 1925 he moved into a small studio on the site, with a simple bed among the plans and models. In all, he gave it forty-three years.

Around 1914 the project had also been in trouble. Instead of raising the building evenly, as you normally would, the effort went into finishing one Nativity bell tower, Saint Barnabas. One historian has called it "a marketing operation": show people something finished so the donations keep coming. That's his reading, not a proven fact.

What did Gaudí live to see finished?

Just one tower: Saint Barnabas, completed in November 1925. On 7 June 1926, on his usual evening walk to the church of Sant Felip Neri, he was hit by a tram on the Gran Via. Nobody recognised him, and he died on the 10th in the old Santa Creu hospital. His successors finished the other three Nativity towers in 1930.

He'd asked in writing for a simple burial. The church's governing board turned down the city council's offer to pay for the funeral, with thanks, and asked for nothing official and no wreaths. Even so, according to the press at the time, some thirty thousand people turned out, and the nearer the cortège got to the church, the more balconies were draped in black: many of the neighbours had posed for the façade. He was buried in the crypt.

Were Gaudí's plans destroyed?

Many of them, yes. In July 1936, when the Spanish Civil War broke out, fire reached the site. The school Gaudí had built beside the works for the workers' children went up in flames, and in his workshop the plans and photographs burned and the plaster models were broken to pieces. The models for the Nativity façade's choir of angels were lost too.

But not everything was lost. From 1939 the architect Quintana and the other continuators carried on with what had been saved and with plans and photographs already published, piecing the broken models back together. The angels were carved afresh, much later, by Etsuro Sotoo, a Japanese stonemason who arrived at the church in 1978 with a three-month job. He stayed.

Who wanted to stop the works?

On 9 January 1965 the Barcelona newspaper La Vanguardia published a letter calling for the works to stop. It was signed by architects, artists and writers, Le Corbusier, Miró and Tàpies among them. They argued that the city needed parishes, not grand churches, that a great expiatory church belonged to another age, and that there were no genuine Gaudí plans left. The point about the plans, as you've seen, was only half true.

The list of artists also includes a "Subirachs", just the surname. In 1986 the sculptor Josep Maria Subirachs was commissioned to carve the Passion façade, and he gave one of the Evangelists Gaudí's face. The same Subirachs? Probably, but we can't confirm it.

How long did the building permit take?

A hundred and thirty-four years. In May 1885 Bocabella submitted the plans signed by Gaudí to the city council, and a building permit was requested. It didn't arrive until 2019, after an agreement between the church and the council.

Even the light has had to wait for the paperwork. The twelve-pointed star that crowns the tower of the Virgin Mary, made of glass and weighing five and a half tonnes, was lit on 8 December 2021 under a permit for the city's Christmas lights. When that ran out, barely a month later, it was switched off to wait for an agreement between the church and the council on lighting the whole building.

Who pays for the Sagrada Família?

The church was born of the alms a bookseller collected. Over time, the main source of funding for the works became what visitors pay. Who pays has changed; the fact that the building depends on what people put in hasn't.

Gaudí saw just one tower finished. On the centenary of his death, the tower of Jesus Christ was blessed: 172.5 metres high, it made the Sagrada Família the tallest church in the world. What happened between those two dates is the full answer: donations that came in at their own pace, an architect who tested in plaster, a war, a letter asking for it all to stop and a permit that took more than a century.

Fact or legend?

• Fact: the plot was bought in 1881 for a church paid for with alms; the building permit was requested in 1885 and granted in 2019; in July 1936 the workshop's plans and photographs were burned and its plaster models smashed.
• Attributed quote: "My client, God, is in no hurry." Endlessly attributed to Gaudí, but we haven't read a first-hand source for it.
• Interpretation: that Saint Barnabas was finished first to attract donations, in one historian's reading.
• Exaggeration: "all the plans were burned, so what's there now is made up". A great deal was lost, but the work carried on with what was saved and what had been published.
• Legend: that Gaudí meant his tallest tower to fall short of the hill of Montjuïc, out of respect for the work of God. We know of nothing he wrote that says so.
• Probable, not confirmed: that the "Subirachs" who signed the 1965 letter was the sculptor of the Passion façade.

Where to hear it

Podtour tells this story on the route The Sagrada Família, Around the Outside: twelve stops all the way round the block, all from the street. Gaudí's funeral and what was lost in 1936 are told in front of the apse, at the stop "Thirty thousand people to the crypt"; the star and the tallest tower come at the last one, "The star that went dark". The bookseller ("The bookseller who bought a field"), Saint Barnabas ("A tower to show what was possible") and the 1965 letter ("The sculptor who had opposed the church") have stops of their own.

If you're planning your trip, the Barcelona guide has the practical side covered.

Further reading

• Fundació Junta Constructora del Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família (text by Daniel Giralt-Miracle), Cuaderno informativo 2 · Breve historia de la construcción del templo, July 2022 edition (in Spanish). https://sagradafamilia.org/documents/20142/1000558/Cuaderno_02.pdf/d9e90d0b-4e35-878b-ef21-fe3761527317
• Fundació Junta Constructora del Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família, Cuaderno informativo 3 · Gaudí y sus continuadores. El taller (in Spanish). https://sagradafamilia.org/documents/20142/1000558/Cuaderno_03.pdf/d582b053-46af-dd3e-aa91-512296186354
• Ignasi Aragay, «Cómo fue el entierro de Gaudí», Ara (Spanish edition), 27 February 2026. https://es.ara.cat/cultura/arquitectura/entierro-gaudi_1_5661639.html
• Aaron M. Renn, "A Manifesto Against Completing Sagrada Família Church", The Urbanophile, 30 July 2015 (transcription and translation of the letter published in La Vanguardia on 9 January 1965). https://www.urbanophile.com/2015/07/30/a-manifesto-against-completing-sagrada-familia-church/
• Junta Constructora de la Sagrada Família, "Sagrada Família building permit issued", 24 July 2019. https://sagradafamilia.org/en/-/entregada-la-llicencia-d-obres-a-la-sagrada-familia
• Maria Ortega, «¿Por qué ya no se enciende la estrella de la Sagrada Familia?», Ara (Spanish edition), 18 January 2022. https://es.ara.cat/sociedad/barcelona/no-enciende-estrella-sagrada-familia_1_4243353.html