177 Barcelona, Sagrada Familia: Jesus, Mary and Joseph, and the wee donkey

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 Obviously, breathtaking. I ran out of superlatives before I even got inside. Worth coming a very long way to see ( which I myself didn’t: I had a conference round the corner).


And it will soon be finished, with the help of the ticket income from around 5 million visitors a year. It will have eighteen towers: twelve for the apostles, four for the evangelists, one for Mother Mary, and one for the little biddy baby, born, born, born in Bethlehem.


The land to build the basilica was bought in 1881 (the land was cheap then cos not much city), but the church was not actually consecrated until 2010, by Pope Benedict. 


Gaudi of course was chief architect, until he died in 1926 in a tram accident. Since then other architects have tried to follow his inspiration.


I was interested in the fact that the large number of columns in the centre of the structure means that the outside walls are not carrying as much weight and this allows them to have those huge stained glass expanses. Stunning stained glass.


Amazing façades of the nativity and the passion. The nativity side is all organic and flow. Whereas the passion side is all angular and enclosed by stretched tendons.


When I visited with my audio guide I learned lots of stuff. Like for example the fruit in the architecture is summer fruit on one side of the cathedral and autumn fruit on the other, to symbolize things. Also, that quite a few of the architectural elements have neat clever, arithmetical relations between them.


The façade of the passion was my favourite part. We are given a very free reinterpretation of the stations of the cross (that folk culture list, not based on the gospels, of fourteen things that happened to Jesus in his last few days). Only seven of your stations are present, including soldiers gambling over Jesus’s clothes,  and Christ’s death on the cross. But other highlights of the gig are shown, like the last supper, Judas’s garden kiss, and Peter’s “Who he?” booboo.


The wee donkey mentioned above can be found represented twice on the nativity façade. Gaudi searched for a perfect, old, tired, donkey, the sort that looked like it’d trekked to Egypt and used a mould on her (Margarita was her name) to cast for his realistic donkey sculpture. Chloroform was needed; do not try this at home. Other modern ideas: a magic square is shown just next to Judas’s kiss. This is a four by four square of numbers, and every line adds up to 33 - the age of Jesus when he died.


All the sculptures are incredibly striking, down to the secondary characters like the centurion.  There is a small museum on one side of the building, which gives you the history of how it was conceived and built.

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