When will the Sagrada Família be finished? The dates, the towers, the money and why it has taken 140 years

Architecture · 4 September 2026

The Sagrada Família in Barcelona was begun on 19 March 1882, and its central tower, the Tower of Jesus Christ, 172.5 m high, is being completed in 2026 for the hundredth anniversary of Antoni Gaudí's death, which will make it the tallest church in the world and, in the sense most people mean, finished: all eighteen towers built and the building whole. But the Glory facade, the main entrance on Carrer de Mallorca, its sculpture and the monumental stairway that needs a city block of housing demolished will continue into the 2030s, and the board gives no date for those. Below: what is done and what is not, why a church took 144 years, how it is built today, the towers and their meaning, tickets and the arguments, with Gaudí's other buildings in the Buildings by style collection and the full list in Gaudí buildings in Barcelona.

What "finished" means: the timeline

• 1882. First stone, under the diocesan architect Francisco de Paula del Villar, as a neo-Gothic church paid for by a devotional society's donations.
• 1883–1926. Gaudí takes over at 31, redesigns everything, builds the crypt, the apse and the Nativity facade; from 1914 he works on nothing else. One tower is finished when he dies in June 1926. He estimated the church would take two centuries.
• 1936. Anarchists burn the workshop, destroy the plaster models and the drawings and desecrate the crypt; the Civil War stops the site for years.
• 1954–1976. The Passion facade is raised on the west side from the rebuilt models.
• 2010. The nave is vaulted and roofed; Pope Benedict XVI consecrates the church as a basilica, and it is used for worship.
• 2018–2023. The four towers of the Evangelists and the tower of the Virgin Mary (138 m, with its 5.5-ton illuminated star) are finished.
• 2026. The Tower of Jesus Christ is topped with its 17 m cross, the structure complete.
• 2030s. The Glory facade and its narthex, the sculpture programme, the chapels and the stairway across Carrer de Mallorca, which depends on the city expropriating and demolishing the apartment blocks that stand in the way; the board has said this could take until about 2034 or later.

Sagrada Família.

Why it took 140 years

Gaudí said, "My client is not in a hurry." The church is an expiatory temple, built by a private foundation on donations alone with no money from the state, the city or the Church, so for its first century it advanced only as fast as the collection plate allowed, and in the 1930s and 1940s it did not advance at all. The Civil War destroyed the models and drawings, and it took decades to reconstruct them from broken plaster and photographs. Gaudí's geometry, of hyperboloids and helicoids, could not be drawn in conventional plans, and every stone of the nave was a different shape, so building went at the pace of hand carving until the 1990s, when aeronautical software made the forms computable and the stone could be cut by numerically controlled machines; since 2000, with income from four and a half million visitors a year, it has been built faster than at any time in its history, and the pandemic shutdown of 2020 pushed the 2026 date back for the Glory facade but not for the tower. It is an extreme case of how the great cathedrals were built, described in how the cathedrals were built.

How it is built now

• Stone panels. The upper towers are not laid stone by stone: panels of stone bonded to post-tensioned reinforced concrete are made in a workshop outside the city, lifted by crane and fixed with steel, so the Jesus tower rose in a few years instead of decades.
• Machine carving. Every element is modelled in 3D and cut by robotic saws and milling machines, then finished by hand.
• Materials. Montjuïc sandstone from the original quarry is exhausted, so stone comes from the Pyrenees, Galicia, Scotland and Iran, matched by colour; the towers are topped with Venetian glass mosaic and ceramic.
• Money. Tickets and donations, about 100 million euros a year before the pandemic; in 2019 the church paid the city 36 million euros for a building licence it had never had in 137 years.
• Team. Chief architect Jordi Faulí, the ninth since Gaudí, and a workshop of about two hundred, with sculptors Josep Maria Subirachs (the Passion facade, 1987–2005) and Etsuro Sotoo (the Nativity facade and doors).

The eighteen towers and what they mean

Twelve towers, four on each of the three facades, stand for the Apostles, 98 to 120 m high; four around the crossing for the Evangelists, 135 m, topped with their symbols, the angel, the lion, the ox and the eagle; one over the apse for the Virgin Mary, 138 m; and the central tower for Jesus Christ, 172.5 m, topped by a four-armed cross that will be lit and visible from the sea. Gaudí kept it a metre below Montjuïc hill because nothing made by man should overtop God's mountain. The three facades tell the story: Nativity on the east, Gaudí's own, for the sunrise, with its green tree of life and the birth of Christ in stone; Passion on the west, for the sunset, with Subirachs's bone-like angular figures that Gaudí had specified should be "hard, bare, as if made of bone"; Glory on the south, still to come, the entrance to the nave for the Judgement and the way to heaven. Inside, the columns branch like trees, of granite, basalt and porphyry by their load, and the nave is lit by windows in cool colours on the Nativity side and warm on the Passion side. The interior seats 9,000.

Visiting

Open every day; tickets sell by time slot online and run out days ahead in summer, with the basilica alone at about 26 euros, and more for an audio guide or one of the towers: a ticket for the Nativity or Passion towers includes a lift up and a walk down, and children under six are not allowed on the towers. The best light inside is late afternoon, when the Passion windows glow; mass on Sundays is free and needs no ticket but gives no tour. The Gaudí House Museum and the crypt where he is buried are separate. The whole building is best understood after the small crypt at the Colònia Güell, 20 km away, where he tested every idea in it.

Versions and theories

• Is it still Gaudí? The crypt, the apse and the Nativity facade are his; the rest is built from reconstructed models and interpretation. In 1965 Le Corbusier, Alvar Aalto, Bruno Zevi and others signed a letter asking that it be stopped; Barcelona's architects have protested since; UNESCO lists only Gaudí's parts. The builders answer that he left the geometry and the rules and expected others to finish it, as with any cathedral.
• The Subirachs sculptures. The angular Passion figures of the 1980s and 1990s were denounced as brutal and un-Gaudí; Subirachs said Gaudí himself had asked for hard, skeletal forms. Both are true.
• Will the stairway ever be built? The Glory facade's stairway needs the block across Carrer de Mallorca demolished, with about 1,000 flats and 3,000 residents; the city has not agreed, and a smaller version is being discussed. This is the part of "finished" with no date.
• The tunnel. The high-speed rail tunnel under the street (2010–13) was said to threaten the foundations; monitoring found no damage.
• Will it be the tallest church? Yes, at 172.5 m against Ulm Minster's 161.5 m, and the tallest building in Barcelona, unless someone builds higher first; the city's height rules make that unlikely near it.

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