Good grief! How the city of Barcelona has changed over the years! I don’t recall any of these buildings… The apse of the Sagrada Familia is a silent witness to the passing centuries. This is one of the first sections of the church to be built, even before the Façade of the Nativity. That’s why it is still in the Neo-Gothic style, like the crypt over which it is built. Here, I tried to create an evocative and unusual grouping of spires and buttresses, amongst which I inserted a number of naturalistic features.

However, it is still incomplete. When the building work comes to an end, along with the large spire dedicated to the Virgin Mary it will also have two sacristies at the sides, linked by the cloister that will surround the entire building.

Can you see the stained glass windows? Their job is to illuminate the seven chapels in the apse, behind the high altar. They are dedicated to the Seven Sorrows and Joys of St. Joseph, and they were built at the initiative of my great friend and founder of the church, Josep María Bocabella.

If you look carefully, you can see a number of gargoyles on the buttresses, shaped like reptiles and grass-snakes crawling down the walls. They represent sins and demons fleeing the church because of the proximity of the power of God.

But let’s hurry up! I can’t wait to see the state of the building work on the Façade of Glory! Let’s go around the church to the opposite side, to the main entrance that faces the Carrer Mallorca.



(c) (R) 2013, MUSMon com S.L.
Text (a) Diego Laforga Marcos (2013)

Pictures
Source: Own work
Author: Carlos Marcos (2013)

Picture: Facade of the Glory (2012)
Source: Wikipedia
Author: Canaan
Licence: This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Picture: Small-scale model of the facade of the Glory (2002)
Source: Wikipedia
Author: Montrealais
Licence: Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled GNU Free Documentation License.