The world's tallest church is now being inaugurated - again
The Sagrada Família is now being inaugurated. Again. Pope Leo XIV is coming to Spain to bless the tallest tower on Barcelona's world-famous landmark.
The ceremony is being held exactly 100 years after the death of legendary architect Antoni Gaudí. The question is whether Leo will give any clues as to whether and when Gaudí can become a saint.
The giant church is said to be one of Europe's biggest tourist attractions. Millions of people visit it every year, despite - or perhaps because - the almost 150-year-old construction never seems to be finished.
But there will be some kind of inauguration now, when Leo XIV holds a mass on June 10 to bless the Tower of Christ (La torre de Jesucrist), the centrally located spire that stretches 172.5 meters into the air and makes the church the tallest in the world.
The date has been chosen with care, to honor the church's creator. Exactly a century earlier, on June 10, 1926, Antoni Gaudí died at the Santa Creu Hospital in Barcelona's old Raval district. He had been taken to the modest hospital a few days earlier after being hit by a tram.
“Dedicate myself entirely to the church”
At first, no one recognized the shabbily dressed patient. Gaudí, who was then 73, had long been a successful architect. But after losing several close people, he had stopped caring about anything other than church construction during the last 15 years of his life.
“My friends are dead.” I have neither family nor clients, no fortune or anything, Gaudí is said to have said.
– Now I can devote myself entirely to the church.
The building had thus become his lifeblood, perhaps an obsession. Yet the already long series of works Sagrada Família had originally had nothing to do with him.
The idea of a church dedicated to the Holy Family – Jesus, Mary and Joseph – came in the mid-19th century from the bookseller José María Bocabella and the priest Josep Manyanet. Bocabella had visited Loreto, south of Ancona in Italy, where the original home of the Jesus family according to Christian belief is housed in the Basilica della Santa Casa.
172,000 pesetas
Bocabella and Manyanet wanted something similar in Barcelona and in 1881 therefore bought a plot of land in what is now Eixample. The price for the 12,800 square metre plot of land was 172,000 pesetas, a fairly modest sum equivalent to only about ten thousand today.
The construction began a few years later, financed entirely by donations and based on drawings by the architect Francisco de Paula del Villar – a typical neo-Gothic building of the time, in the same style as, for example, Allhelgonakyrkan in Lund or Oscar Fredriks kyrka in Gothenburg. But it wasn’t long before Villar, after a disagreement with Bocabella, among others, dropped out.
Gaudí was allowed to take over. And he began to steer the project in a completely different direction, according to a motto the then 30-year-old architect is said to have expressed as:
– The straight line belongs to man, the curve belongs to God.
“Half a spaceship”
The plot soon became too small as the drawings grew and the buildings took on the round shapes typical of his work.
“Gaudí started from the Holy Scriptures and nature and wanted to spread the evangelical message through architecture,” as it is now described on the Sagrada Família website. Or as the British The Guardian describes the style a little less pompously: “Half sandcastle, half spaceship”.
The project became so ambitious that over the years he understood that it would have to be completed by others. When Gaudí died in 1926, only about a quarter of the building was completed.
“My client is in no hurry,” he is also said to have said, referring to God.
His followers were able to continue the work, but not without drama. In connection with the start of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, anarchists entered the crypt and partially destroyed Gaudí’s drawings. This may have contributed to the fact that the construction then, during the poor post-war period, crept forward or a long time; it took until 2010 before it was said to be halfway there.
Inauguration 2010
But by then the sacred project had received a modern, worldly salvation: mass tourism. As Barcelona grew as a global tourist destination, donations skyrocketed. From having consisted of small coins from Catholics who repented of their sins, the income for the construction now consists of several hundred Swedish kronor per ticket, and several million annual visitors from countries such as China, the USA and South Korea.
And even though there was still half the work to be done, in 2010 the then Pope, Benedict XVI, also showed his support by consecrating the Sagrada Família as a Catholic basilica on site.
Since then, it has been a functioning church, while construction continues at full speed. And in February of this year, it reached a literal culmination, when the cross on the tower of Christ was installed. With a new height of 172.5 meters, the Sagrada Família beats the previous record holder, Ulmer Münster in Germany, by a margin of ten meters, as the world's tallest church.
Step two of four
The foundation that manages the church and the building is now calling the Sagrada Família “architecturally complete”. And on the evening of June 10, Leo XIV will rededicate it. The Pope will then hold a mass with a ceremony to bless the tower of Christ.
The grand event is a stark contrast to Gaudí’s quiet passing exactly 100 years earlier. But “God’s architect”, as he has been called, is in more focus than ever. He was declared venerabilis (Latin for “venerable”) in 2025, step two of four on the way to becoming a saint. And in connection with the Pope’s visit to Spain, many are looking for clues about how Leo intends to take that process further.
FACTS
Sagrada Família
The full name is “Basílica i Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família” (Basilica and Temple of the Expiatory of the Holy Family), referring to the family with the baby Jesus, Mary and Joseph.
The church began construction north of the old city center of Barcelona in 1882.
The financial foundation was the purchase of the plot for a sum equivalent to only about ten thousand kronor in today's kronor. Since then, the construction has been financed by donations and other visitor income. The size of these reflects how the project has grown. In 2025, the church foundation reported income of 134.5 million euros (1.45 billion kronor). This corresponds to 4 million kronor every day, or 10,000 kronor every four minutes.
The construction has therefore been ongoing for over 140 years. According to the current plan, the last major construction work should be completed in the mid-2030s.
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