Sagrada Família
Gaudí is buried beneath a church begun in 1882 and still unfinished — one that in 2025 became the world's tallest.
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Two facades by two very different hands: the Nativity side drips with lifelike carved detail; the Passion side, added decades later, is all gaunt angles. Inside, columns branch like a stone forest and stained glass throws colored light across the nave.
What to look for
- On the Passion facade, a 4x4 magic square whose every row, column and diagonal sums to 33 — Christ's age at death — reworked from Dürer's Melencolia I.
- On the Nativity facade, a turtle and a tortoise at the column bases (land and sea) and chameleons for change — Gaudí's naturalism up close.
- Overhead, columns fan into branches, shifting from square bases to octagons to circles as they climb.
Book timed tickets online ahead — they sell out. Add the tower lift for a close-up of the spires; you descend a narrow spiral of 300+ steps.
Sagrada Família is one of 39 sights worth the detour in Barcelona, all bundled offline in Voyage GO — download the Barcelona pack and it sits on your map with no signal, filling your travel passport the moment you walk past.
More to see in Barcelona
- Camp NouThe bowl that once crammed 120,000 people in to watch Barça — European football's biggest room.
- Park GüellGaudí's failed luxury subdivision — 2 of 60 planned homes ever built — that Barcelona inherited as a mosaic playground.
- Casa Milà (La Pedrera)Gaudí's last private house looks like a wind-carved sea cliff parked on a city corner.
- Casa BatllóGaudí reskinned a townhouse into a slain dragon, down to columns shaped like leg bones.
- Barcelona CathedralThirteen white geese live in the cloister — one for each year Saint Eulalia was alive before Rome killed her.
- Palau de la Música CatalanaA glass dome the color of the sun dips into the hall like an upside-down bowl of light.