Groundbreaking of the Sagrada Família

Also called: Basílica de la Sagrada Família

The first stone of the Basilica of the Holy Family was laid in Barcelona. Gaudí, who took over the next year, gave it his life, and more than 140 years on it is still being built.

On 19 March 1882 the first stone of the Basilica of the Holy Family was laid in Barcelona. When the first architect withdrew, the 31-year-old Antoni Gaudí took over the next year and redesigned it completely, imagining a church whose columns branch like a forest and whose forms rise in the curves of nature. Gaudí spent his last years living on the site and died in 1926 after being hit by a tram; by then only the Nativity façade was complete.

In the Spanish Civil War in 1936 his drawings and plaster models were burned and smashed, but the work went on, piecing together the fragments and funded by donations and entrance fees. In 2005 Gaudí’s own parts became a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and in 2010 Pope Benedict XVI consecrated the basilica. The aim was to finish its tallest spire, the Tower of Jesus Christ, in 2026, the centenary of Gaudí’s death.