Tickets and a tour guide complete with microphone and headphone was all arranged for us! This group is amazing and takes such good care of the monastics, including me along for the ride! They all are very kind and solicitous of me! They really defer to and respect Doug and especially appreciate that he speaks such fluent Spanish. For several years he and Phap Son, a Spanish monastic whose mom I stayed with on Ibiza four years ago, and then I stayed in Barcelona on my own after I had visited Doug in Plum Village. Helena is supposed to be here and was in Madrid but I haven't seen her yet. I did see Michael (Phap Son) arrive and he is no longer in robes but still working with the group. I had heard he had left PV soon after I was there and we celebrated his 47th birthday with homemade pizza then but don't know the story!
Anyway he and Michael had been to Spain and Ibiza, one of the Balearics Islands like Majorca off the Spanish coast, several times. So the Spanish sangha's know Doug very well!
Sagrada Familia I remember from 1966 when Betty, Mary and I traveled that year in Europe together. I had never heard of Gaudi and thought the whole I thing was weird. We didn't go inside either because you couldn't or because we had no money. We saw 28 countries in that year hitch-hiking and staying in hostels. But I came with $600 and a one way ticket! I didn't go into the Louvre or many other sites that weren't free!
Anyhow In 1882 the foundation stone was laid for a church conceived by Francis de Paula del Villarreal who only worked on it for a year and a half. Antonio Gaudi, a young architect from Tarragon, took over the project for the next 43 years! It is still unfinished as he planned it and is projected for completion in 2026 which would be 100 years since his death, by getting hit and killed by a local bus or tram! There is 35% still incomplete.
In the display area I read that he was a sickly child with rheumatic heart disease and could not do normal sports and play. So he spent a lot of time in nature. This totally influenced his bizarre for the time architecture, called Modernism. This movement was in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It found its highest expression in architecture with a few others besides Gaudi.
The church is the reverse of other cathedrals (BTW, this cathedral was dedicated and declared a basilica by Benedict XVI in 2010 with 6000+ people attending!) Because there are no pews or chairs, it I can hold up to 8000 people. Masses are said there twice a day, on a plain big hunk of stone altar from Iran.
Did I mention one of the reasons for the slow construction is I it is and was built solely by donated funds! The outside façade that Gaudi completed is the Nativity showing happy scenes in the life of Jesus - birth, Angel Gabriel appearing to Mary, wedding of Mary and Joseph, presentation in the temple, etc., and these scenes are decorated all around with scenes from Azure, that he so loved as a child. The two pillars stand on top of a tortoise one and a turtle on the other. there are four steeples on each façade representing the twelve apostles plus four towers for the evangelists and one for Mary and one for Jesus. Joseph is the patron saint of the whole church so he doesn't feet a tower. Another façade is the Passion designed by another architect and done since 1986. Much more modernistic and less detailed but nonetheless beautiful.
Inside there are no pictures in the gorgeous stained glass windows that spread gorgeous colors throughout. There are 16 pillars of different sizes and bending slightly inward, representing as the towers outside. The pillars are really representing trees so the whole thing is a forest! Very cool!
There is a crypt below where Gaudi is buried. In one corner outside is a Gaudi designed school for the children of the workers! He was quite wealthy as he designed many other buildings in town for wealthy industrialists.
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