Sagrada Família: Gaudí's dream materialized one hundred years after his death

100 years after Antoni Gaudí's death, the Sagrada Família is about to experience the moment its architect never saw: the official completion of the basilica and the consecration of its central tower, at a mass presided over by Pope Leo XIV on June 10, 2026.

La Sagrada Família, Barcelona's most emblematic monument, is about to experience in 2026 the moment that Gaudí never stopped imagining but never saw: the completion of his "expiatory temple" and the liturgical consecration of its central tower, one hundred years to the day after his death, at a mass presided over by Pope Leo XIV.

A dream in stone, one hundred years later

Antoni Gaudí died on June 10, 1926, struck down by a streetcar, leaving unfinished a basilica that had already become his mystical and architectural obsession. A century later, on June 10, 2026, the Sagrada Família finally reached completion, sealing this unprecedented dialogue between the vision of a Catalan modernist and the patience of an entire city.

The inauguration of the Tower of Jesus Christ, the highest point of the building, brings to a close Gaudí's almost utopian ambition: to turn Barcelona into a Mediterranean Jerusalem, where the modern city is structured around a sacred relief of stone, light and symbols. In this gesture, it is less a building that is completed than an urban and spiritual narrative begun at the end of the XIXᵉ century, continued by several generations of architects, craftsmen and engineers.

A monumental project on the scale of a century

Scheduled for completion in 2026, the Sagrada Família construction site will have accompanied Barcelona's metamorphoses: monarchy, republic, civil war, dictatorship, democracy, then mass tourism. Interrupted, contested and reinvented by the latest techniques and aesthetic debates, the basilica has become a laboratory where traditional stone-cutting, digital modelling and contemporary structural prowess meet.

The completion of the Tower of Jesus Christ, blessed that year, symbolizes the transition from the sketchbooks burned during the war to the 3D models that have enabled us to reconstitute Gaudi's intuition. Time, here, is no longer an obstacle, but a building material: each decade adds its layer of meaning, to the point where the building tells as much about Gaudí's Barcelona as that of the XXIᵉ century.

The pope's mass, a crowning achievement

On June 10, 2026, Pope Leo XIV will preside over a solemn mass in the basilica, at 7:30pm, in tribute to Antoni Gaudí and to bless the central tower. The event, conceived as the pinnacle of the centenary celebrations, will bring together cardinals, bishops, faithfuland delegations from all over the world, making Barcelona the liturgical heart of Catholicism for one evening.

This celebration follows on from the consecration of the Sagrada Família as a minor basilica by Benedict XVI in 2010, but with a new symbolic significance: for the first time, the liturgy takes place in a building that is at last vertically complete, with the cross at the top bringing the architectural narrative to a close. The mass thus becomes an act of interpretation, almost a critique in motion, linking Gaudí's formal radicalism with the living tradition of the Church.

An ARTE evening as an epilogue

Echoing this event, on June 6, 2026, ARTE is devoting a special evening to the Sagrada Família, with the documentary "Sagrada Família - Le rêve achevé" by Marc Jampolsky, an updated version of a 2022 film tracing the final stages of construction. The film will be followed by a performance of Mozart's Requiem, recorded in the basilica.