Sagrada Familia

Nobody alive when this building started has lived to see it finished. Construction began on March 19, 1882, under architect Francisco de Paula del Villar, who quit after a year over a disagreement about materials. A 31-year-old Antoni Gaudi took over and promptly threw out every plan, transforming what was meant to be a conventional neo-Gothic church into something the world had never seen. Gaudi devoted the remaining 43 years of his life to the project, eventually moving into the workshop on-site, sleeping among his plaster models. By the time he was struck by a tram and killed in 1926, less than a quarter of the building was complete.

What makes the Sagrada Familia structurally extraordinary is that Gaudi abandoned flying buttresses entirely. Instead he designed tree-like columns that branch at the top to distribute weight, a system he developed by hanging weighted strings from the ceiling and photographing the resulting curves upside down. The interior feels like standing inside a stone forest, with light pouring through stained glass that shifts from cool blues on the north side to warm golds and reds on the south.

During the Spanish Civil War, anarchists broke into Gaudi's workshop and destroyed many of his original models and drawings. Reconstruction of those plans has guided builders ever since, supplemented by computer modeling that Gaudi never could have imagined. In February 2026, the central Jesus tower reached its full height of 172.5 metres, making it the tallest church in the world, surpassing Germany's Ulm Minster.

The building has eighteen towers in total: twelve for the apostles, four for the evangelists, one for the Virgin Mary, and the tallest for Jesus Christ. After 144 years of construction, the exterior was completed in late 2025, though sculptural details and the main entrance stairway will continue until 2034.