Sagrada Família

The project was conceived by the Barcelona bookseller José María Bocabella, founder of the Spiritual Association of Devotees of St. Joseph, who returned from a visit to the Vatican wanting to build a church inspired by the basilica at Loreto. It was planned as an "expiatory temple", funded entirely by donations from those seeking to counter a growing rejection of the Catholic Church. The apse crypt was begun on 19 March 1882 to a standard Gothic revival design by the architect Francisco de Paula del Villar, and was completed before Villar resigned on 18 March 1883.

Antoni Gaudí took over as chief architect after Villar's resignation, formally appointed Architect Director on 28 March 1884, and radically changed the design, combining Gothic forms with curvilinear Art Nouveau. He devoted the rest of his life to the project and is buried in its crypt. When he died in 1926, less than a quarter of the building was complete.

Construction relied solely on private donations and progressed slowly. In July 1936, anarchists of the Iberian Anarchist Federation set fire to the crypt and broke into Gaudí's workshop, partially destroying his original plans. In 1939 Francesc de Paula Quintana took over site management, working from material saved from the workshop and from plans reconstructed using published drawings and photographs; building resumed with intermittent progress through the 1950s.

Isidre Puig Boada, Lluís Bonet i Garí and Francesc Cardoner carried the work forward from 1940 alongside Quintana, and Bonet i Garí's son Jordi Bonet i Armengol, director until 2012, began introducing computers into the design and construction process in the 1980s. The central nave vaulting was completed in 2000.

In 2005 UNESCO extended its "Works of Antoni Gaudí" World Heritage listing to cover the Sagrada Família's crypt and Nativity façade. Pope Benedict XVI consecrated the still-unfinished church and proclaimed it a basilica on 7 November 2010, before a congregation of 6,500 with a further 50,000 following the Mass from outside; construction passed its structural midpoint the same year. The building has never been the cathedral of the Archdiocese of Barcelona, that title belongs separately to the Cathedral of the Holy Cross and Saint Eulalia.

Completion by 2026, the centenary of Gaudí's death, was targeted from 2014 but slowed by the COVID-19 pandemic, which halted construction entirely between 11 March and 4 July 2020, the first stoppage since the Civil War. Since 2018 the stone needed to finish the building has come from the Withnell Quarry near Chorley, England, after the original Montjuïc quarry stone grew too fragile at depth.

On 30 October 2025 the rising central tower surpassed Ulm Minster's 161.53-metre height to become the world's tallest church, and its structure was finished on 20 February 2026 at 172.5 metres, one metre short of Barcelona's Montjuïc hill by Gaudí's own design, since he held that his creation should not surpass God's natural work. Pope Leo XIV blessed and inaugurated the completed tower on 10 June 2026, coinciding with the centenary of Gaudí's death; its interior is expected to be finished in 2028. The basilica receives no government or official church funding, relying instead on ticket revenue and private donations.