You beat me to it! I love that there was a break of around 370 years in the middle of building the Kölner Dom. Think about how much the world changed during that time.
The Sagrada Familia is a truly amazing building. It’s so rare in modern times to see construction on such a grand scale. It’s not about how tall your building is, it’s about the detail that goes into the design. Tall glass needles have nothing on the intricate beauty of something like this. This is a building I can imagine humanity enjoying hundreds of years from now.
About the “physical models”- the cathedral was designed to be built using materials which are very strong in compression and very weak in tension. To ensure it would stand up, Gaudi built models of it upside-down out of string.
One of the reasons there weren’t many designs around was that the building was used as an armoury during the Spanish Revolution and the models and drawings were destroyed.
They now custom develop software to figure out some of the things that Gaudi did somehow without computers of any kind. Entire generations of masons and craftspeople apprentice there and spend their entire career on the one building without seeing it complete.
And walking up the (steep, narrow, vertiginous) stairs to the towers, where thousands of people have worn deep ruts into the stone, even though some of the other stone pieces are still being hoisted into place, you go to the roof and find that the stunningly luminous roof is made of… broken old glass.
It’s a beautiful and, in some ways tragic, building. Well worth the trip to Barcelona. Of course, there are a lot of things in Barcelona that are worth the trip to Barcelona.
You know what? Just go to Barcelona. Visit the market when you’re there.
Oh, man, I can’t wait to go back. When I first learned about Sagrada Familia, I knew I had to visit Barcelona. Eventually I did, but that was BK (before kids). We’re thinking they’d be old enough to enjoy a visit, but still, I can imagine their response to “C’mon, don’t you want to visit another old church?!”
Well when you put it like that… I never even made it to Park Güell, myself (over 2 trips at that). I think the various forms of rail transport would go over pretty well. I just couldn’t see bringing them into, say, Irati.
That was part of it, but the bigger issue would be the food being well-received by the kids. (EDIT: We already give in and prepare/obtain 2 or 3 different meals as it is.) Though the older one is getting less picky and will eat fish. (When he was about 15 mos., we took him to Europe (but not Spain). He was too young to care or complain (at least in decipherable English)).
I remember going there when Franco was still in power, and there was less of it, and the workforce was tiny. Nevertheless, I just stood and gaped, and murmured inwardly “This is real. This is a real thing. This is really here”. Because real things had never looked like that before. There are other Gaudi buildings and gardens in Barcelona, but nothing else comes close.
