Sagrada Família: The Tower That Wasn’t There

Kongo is on the road again. He and Mrs. Kongo flew into Barcelona ahead of eighteen days across the Mediterranean — Barcelona to Monte Carlo, then Monte Carlo to Athens, aboard Atlas Ocean Voyages’ World Traveller. We sail this afternoon at 5:30.

But the monkey didn’t come to Barcelona for the ship. He came for one building.

Kongo last stood in front of the Sagrada Família in September 2015. He wrote about it here, and he ended that post with a line he has thought about more than once since: “Kongo only hopes that he is around for the completion. What an amazing spectacle that will be.”

He also wrote, because it was what everybody said in 2015, that the basilica was expected to be finished in 2026.

Well. It is 2026.

In 2015 the basilica had eight towers — four over the Nativity façade, four over the Passion. The middle of the roofline was a gap full of scaffolding. Everything Gaudí drew as the heart of the building simply was not there yet.

It is there now. The Tower of the Virgin Mary went up in December 2021, with a twelve-pointed star at the top that lights the skyline at night. The four Evangelist towers followed — Luke and Mark in 2022, Matthew and John in 2023. And on 20 February 2026 the final section of the Tower of Jesus Christ was set in place, bringing the basilica to its full height of 172.5 meters and making it the tallest church in the world. On 10 June, the hundredth anniversary of Gaudí’s death, Pope Leo XIV blessed the cross on top.

Five towers in eleven years, after a hundred and thirty-three years of building. The monkey picked a good decade to be away.

So is it finished? No — and Kongo is glad. The great tower cranes are being dismantled, but the Glory façade on the Carrer de Mallorca side is still an active construction site and will be until somewhere around 2034. The bronze doors, the decoration, the grand staircase: none of it built. A finished Sagrada Família would be a monument. An unfinished one is still an argument.

Now the practical part. It was hot and the monkey and Mrs. Kongo hiked 1.3 miles from their hotel to the basilica and back in 90 degree heat. Barcelona in August is hot in a way that makes a marble floor feel like a personal favor, and the church was packed shoulder to shoulder. Neither of those was a surprise and neither is worth complaining about — but if you are going, buy the earliest entry slot they will sell you. Three million people came the year Kongo was last here. It is closer to five million now.

We did not go up a tower. With the heat and the lines, it just wasn’t a viable option.

Which is just as well, because you still can’t go up the one that matters. In 2015 Kongo wrote about a planned elevator to the top of the Jesus spire. It exists — a glass panoramic lift running to a viewpoint at 164 meters — but it does not open to the public until 2027, and it will carry eleven people at a time. Eleven. In a building that takes five million visitors a year. Kongo has done the arithmetic and does not like his odds, but he intends to try. Someday.

Then inside. Three things.

The ceiling is a problem. Not a flaw — a problem the way a good puzzle is a problem. Kongo called it a stone forest last time and that is still the right word, but eleven years ago he was looking at a roof. Now he was looking at a ceiling that goes all the way up into the towers, and there is no honest way to take it in from where you are standing, because it was never designed to be taken in. You look up, and your eye keeps going, and there is always another layer above the layer you just resolved. The monkey stood in one spot for a long while and got nowhere, which is the correct outcome. He also got dizzy and had a stiff neck. If you look too long, you lose your balance.

The light is worse. Same problem, more of it. The east windows run cold — blues and greens, morning, water, birth. The west windows run hot — red, orange, gold, evening, fire. By early afternoon the whole west wall is burning and there is more colour in the room than a person can process at once. You do not photograph this. You photograph a piece of it and admit that is what you did.

The stone is the part nobody mentions. Look down instead of up. The columns are not all the same rock, and the difference is not decoration — Gaudí sorted them by load. The four columns at the crossing that carry the Jesus tower, some six thousand tons of it, are red porphyry, the strongest stone in the building. The ring beneath the Evangelist towers is black basalt. The nave columns are grey granite. The outermost are yellowish Montjuïc sandstone, quarried from the hill on the other side of the city. Every column is doing exactly as much work as its rock can do, and no more. Kongo has been in a lot of churches. He cannot think of another one where the structural engineering is also the colour scheme.

Then there is the thing above the altar, which is most of the reason for this post.

A baldachin is the canopy over a high altar. Every large church has one, and in every large church Kongo has been in, it stands on four legs. Gaudí took the legs away. His hangs from the vault — a seven-sided terracotta canopy five meters across, ringed with fifty small lamps and trimmed with wheat and grapes, floating in mid-air with nothing beneath it but the altar. And under the canopy, also hanging, the crucified Christ.

It is strange, and it is entirely deliberate. The Father is above, in the vault. The Son hangs below. The canopy — that ring of gold light between them — is the Holy Spirit. The whole Trinity is stacked in the air over the altar, and if you are sitting in the nave you are sitting underneath it.

Kongo read it as a halo before he knew the explanation, and would argue that is the point. You get it before anyone tells you.

And then, on the way out, the thing the monkey felt he had actually found.

High on the interior wall, at the level of the choir gallery, there is a knight. Armoured, angular, cut in slabs, nothing like the rest of the building — and a face set into the top of him like a stone let into a wall. Almost nobody was looking at it. Every phone in the room was pointed at the ceiling.

It is Saint George — Sant Jordi, the patron of Catalonia — by Josep Maria Subirachs, the sculptor who spent twenty years on the Passion façade and whose hard, blocky figures out front still make some visitors angry because they do not look like Gaudí. Subirachs never pretended they did. He signed his own century instead of forging someone else’s.

Kongo likes him better for it. And he likes that Sant Jordi is up there facing into the church, watching the room, while everyone else looks the other way.

We came back out into the heat. Mrs. Kongo found a piece of shaded stone and sat down on it, which after a few hours on a marble floor is its own kind of architecture.

Eleven years ago the monkey hoped he would be around to see it finished. He was half right, which turns out to be the better half. The towers are up, the cross is blessed, and there is still a façade to build. Gaudí said his client was in no hurry. Neither, it seems, is Kongo.

The ship sails at 5:30 this evening. Tomorrow, Valencia.

Travel safe. Have fun!