On Saturday, April 8, we visited La Sagrada Familia which is a beautiful, unfinished Catholic church largely designed by Antoni Gaudi. Gaudi was a brilliant Catalan architect and designer. Several of his designs are located in Barcelona.
La Sagrada Familia, or the Sacred Family, is incredibly beautiful. I visited La Sagrada Familia in 2010 for the first time but only saw it from the outside as we did not go inside. The facades were spectacular! Also, so much more work has been done on the church since I had seen it last. Admittedly, I didn’t do a whole lot of research on the church when I visited the first time beyond basic Wikipedia searches. This time around, Ashley and I got tickets to go inside! Since it was Holy Week in Spain and it was crawling in tourists, getting tickets was a bit more difficult than we anticipated. Unfortunately, we waited too long to buy tickets and they were a bit scarce. Ashley really wanted to go up the tower but by the time we were looking at tickets, you could only get in with a guided tour AND there were only non-English guided tours left and not many of them. Since Ashley really wanted to see the tower, she booked an Italian guided tour which included the tower ticket. I booked a regular self-guided tour which did not include the tower.
La Sagrada Familia actually has a really neat and well done companion app for the tour. Within the app, you have your tickets, other information, and the self-guided audio tour. Having the self-guided tour within the app on my own device using my own earbuds was really nice. A lot better than carrying around some other clunky device. It was also pretty neat that you could pre-download the audio files when you were on wifi instead of trying to use cellular data. This time around, I took the opportunity to listen to all of the self-guided tour audio points of interest. I learned quite a lot about the history, the intent, the present status, and the future! There is A LOT of subtle detail and meaning behind almost every aspect of the church.
I had never seen inside the church. The outside facades are quite different from each other in subject and style. The Nativity Facade is the oldest facade and is dedicated to the birth of Jesus. It is incredibly detailed and ornate with many different components. The Passion Facade is dedicated to Jesus’ Passion, death, and resurrection. This facade is a bit more sparse and consists of many angular aspects. The third facade is not yet build but is known as the Glory Facade. This facade will depict the glory of Jesus even after his death. The Glory Facade will eventually become the central entrance to the church.
Upon walking into the church, I was blown away. I had never seen the inside of the church. It was absolutely breathtaking. The design is similar to a forest with the large colums holding up the roof that look and branch like trees. The interior is largely open with a walking space around the outside of the columns and seating within them. The altar is at one end with private prayer areas behind it. The giant stained glass windows are warm colors on one side and cool colors on the other side. Depending on where the sun is during the day, different colors are prominently featured.
Check out my personal post for some more photos.
