The Sagrada Familia is a Catholic church that began construction on March 19, 1882, under the direction of its architect Francisco de Paula de Villar. The church was originally an idea conceived by a book-seller by the name of Josep Maria Bocabella, who was tormented by the growing liberalism, secularism and fundamental changes in traditional society in Spain at the end of the 19th century and he wanted to build this church as a symbol of the restoration of conservatism and orthodoxy. Supported by other religious groups and believers of similar ideology, Bocabella recruited Villar as the main architect responsible for the construction of this massive church in 1882.
But shortly after Villar, the initial architect, was recruited, he retired in 1883, entrusting the responsibility for the construction of the church to Antoni Gaudi, then very new to the field and just 30 years old. Gaudi soon became very obsessed with the project and gave his flesh and blood designing it with an extraordinary vision. Gaudi, owing to his own conservative views, wanted to make the church an overwhelming figure of revelation and spiritualism. He imagined a design that reflects the nature and essence of the basis of humanity that is the cosmos. The church's complex and intricate designs, depicting chapters from the Bible, and the glass painting, which blends the colours of nature and the reflections it produces, give the interior of the Sagrada an impression of colours similar to those of a forest where sunlight seeps in.
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Gaudi's great plans and vision, unfortunately, came to an end when he was hit by a tram in Barcelona's Gran Via on June 10, 1926, in a tragic accident and succumbed to death 2 days thereafter. Following a great shock caused by his death, other architects and engineers began to work slowly but surely on the completion of the church. But another major hurdle awaited the completion of the Sagrada Familia: the Spanish Civil War of 1936, which lasted until 1939. The anarchists, outraged by the church and orthodoxy, tried to destroy Gaudi's blueprints and sketches in an attempt to stop the construction of the church, which ran counter to liberalism.
After the whole conflict had been calmed down, construction began to resume on the basis of what remained after all the destruction. Construction was rather slow due to the many stresses required of the minimal remnants of the main design. In the 1950s and 1960s, the work was not accelerated, but the 1980s paved the way for the rapid construction of the church, given the booming economy of Catalonia, thanks to growing tourism and the development of technology, which made it possible to better reconstruct the destroyed plans through visual imagery.
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