Barcelona’s most-visited monument is a church Gaudí never finished
Antoni Gaudí (1852–1926) fused nature, faith, and craft into Catalan Modernisme’s wildest buildings. Seven works entered UNESCO lists between 1984 and 2005, yet his Sagrada Família—begun under him in 1883—remains Spain’s most-visited unfinished monument.
Antoni Gaudí was born in 1852, the youngest of five children of a coppersmith whose family had come to Catalonia from the Auvergne. Most of his papers name Reus as his birthplace, but from 1915 he himself sometimes claimed neighbouring Riudoms, his father’s village. Rheumatism in childhood, the hygiene theories of Sebastian Kneipp and his faith pushed him towards strict vegetarianism and harsh fasts, one of which in 1894 nearly killed him.
Poor health also kept him on sick leave for most of his military service between 1875 and 1878, so he never fought in the Third Carlist War and could keep studying architecture in Barcelona, graduating in 1878. His first jobs included lampposts for the Plaça Reial and the Casa Vicens, and a glove showcase he built for the 1878 Paris fair caught the eye of Eusebi Güell, who became his great patron. Instead of detailed plans he worked from three-dimensional models, and he pioneered trencadís, a mosaic made from broken ceramic scraps.
He took over the Sagrada Família in 1883, redesigned it completely, and from 1915 worked on nothing else. In between came Casa Calvet, named the city’s best building of 1900, then Park Güell, Casa Batlló and Casa Milà between 1904 and 1910. In 1906 he moved into a showcase house in Park Güell, now the Gaudí Museum, and in 1925 he moved into the basilica’s workshop itself.
During the anticlerical riots of the Tragic Week in 1909 he feared for the church, which came through unharmed. A 1910 exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris, arranged at Count Güell’s invitation, won warm French reviews. Seven of his works became UNESCO World Heritage Sites between 1984 and 2005, and his religious devotion earned him the name God’s Architect: a canonisation cause opened in 2003, and Pope Francis declared him Venerable in April 2025.
Source: Antoni Gaudí
