Basilica del Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família

By Amarachi Orie, CNN

CNN — After a wait of more than 140 years, five central towers of Barcelona’s famous Sagrada Familia basilica are at last finished. When the sixth and final central tower is finished, expected in 2026, construction of the church, which began in 1882 will be complete.

After a wait of more than 140 years, five central towers of Barcelona’s famous Sagrada Familia basilica are at last finished. When the sixth and final central tower is finished — expected in 2026 — construction of the church, which began in 1882, will be complete.

Design of the church was spearheaded by celebrated Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí, who decided the monumental structure would have 18 huge, spindle-shaped towers, each symbolizing a different biblical figure—the 12 apostles, the four evangelists, the Virgin Mary and Jesus.

The final sculptural piece was placed on the tower of Matthew the Evangelist, according to a news release from the Basílica de la Sagrada Família. A day later, the tower of John the Evangelist was crowned with the figure of an eagle, it said.

“The four towers of the Evangelists are finished! Soon we’ll be celebrating this building milestone!” the church announced in a Facebook post on Friday.

An inauguration mass will be held at the cathedral on November 12, when the four evangelist towers will be illuminated. They will stay lit through Christmas, the church said. It added that the towers of Mark and Luke were previously crowned with a lion and a fox, respectively, last year.

The four evangelist towers stand at 135 meters tall (around 443 feet).

At the end of 2021, a huge, 12-pointed star was placed on top of the 138-meter (453-foot) tall tower of the Virgin Mary to mark its completion.

The remaining tower, representing Jesus Christ, will stand at 172.5 meters tall (566 feet) and will be finished with a 17-meter-tall (56-foot) four-armed cross, according to the cathedral.

An enormous project! The monumental structure is designed to accommodate around 13,000 people. When Gaudí died in 1926, only an estimated 10-15% of the project had been built, including one transept, a crypt, and some of the apse wall.

Construction, already slow, was interrupted in the late 1930s by the Spanish Civil War, when most of the designs and models of Gaudí— whose tomb lies beneath the cathedral—were destroyed. Current designs are based on surviving and reconstructed materials, as well as reimagined adaptations of the original. In 1984, the building was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site, and it was consecrated by Pope Benedict XVI for religious worship in 2010.

The construction of the church was carried out illegally for 137 years, until 2019, when a building permit was finally issued by Barcelona’s city council. Authorities only discovered the “anomaly” that it had never been granted planning permission in 2016. When complete, the Sagrada Familia will become the world’s tallest church, overtaking Ulm Minster in Germany.

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