Overview
Gaudí took over a year into the project and worked on it for 43 years, the last 12 exclusively, living on the site. The design is structural rather than decorative: the leaning columns branch like trees because that is how the loads are carried, which let him drop the flying buttresses he called crutches. Anarchists burned his workshop and models in 1936, and the work since has been a reconstruction of his intentions from plaster fragments and photographs — which is the strongest argument against the building and its builders make it openly.
Highlights
Book a timed ticket weeks ahead and add a tower — the Nativity tower for the older carving, the Passion tower for the view down the nave roof. Go in the late afternoon when the west windows are lit and the interior turns red and orange. The Nativity facade is Gaudí’s own work; the Passion facade is Subirachs from the 1980s and deliberately unlike it.