One of the most visited landmarks in Barcelona is a church that is still not finished, even now that it is the tallest in the world. The Sagrada Família has been under construction for more than 140 years. Its central Tower of Jesus Christ was topped out in early 2026, reaching 172.5 metres and lifting the basilica past every other church on earth, though work on the interior will run on for years yet. Antoni Gaudí gave it the last 43 years of his life, until his death in 1926. Most people come for the big picture, the soaring towers, the forest of stone columns inside, the sheer scale of it.
But the building rewards a closer look, and one small detail has grown into a favourite piece of Barcelona lore. Stand in front of the Nativity façade, look up at its four bell towers, and some visitors will swear the spacing looks a little irregular. There is a well-worn story about why: a builder’s slip that Gaudí is said to have noticed and let stand. Whether the towers really are uneven is harder to pin down than the tale suggests, and the tale itself is worth a second look.
The Spacing on the Nativity Façade
Look for yourself and it is a subtle thing at most. The four towers rise in two pairs, flanking the central doorway, and some people feel one pair sits a fraction closer than the other. If it is there at all, it is slight, and the façade does everything it can to pull your eye elsewhere. Every surface is crowded with carved stone, and your gaze goes to the tortoise and the turtle at the foot of the two central columns, or to the crowd of figures overhead, long before it reaches the spacing of the towers.
The Nativity façade is the east front, facing Carrer de la Marina. It is the part of the basilica Gaudí worked on longest, and the only one of the three planned façades he saw substantially built before his death. If any face of the temple carries his hand directly, it is this one.
Where the Legend Comes From
The popular version is neat. The uneven look, it says, comes from a setting-out error, a mistake made when the plan was marked out at full size on the ground. The account is credited to the memoirs of Ricard Opisso, who joined Gaudí’s workshop in 1892 as a boy of twelve, to Gaudí’s forty, and grew up to become a well-known Modernisme artist.
At twelve, my family, alarmed by my wild ways, begged Gaudí to keep me until nine at night, the hour when the master left with the rest of his technical team.
Ricard Opisso, recalling his years in Gaudí’s workshop
In that telling, Gaudí was untroubled by the irregularity: he is said to have pointed out that the columns of the Parthenon in Athens are not evenly spaced either, and left it there. It is a lovely story, and a hard one to stand up. Opisso’s memoirs are real, held by his family and written about by Barcelona’s national art museum, the MNAC, which notes that he set his recollections down loosely, with some inaccuracies. The tower anecdote, though, is not in that account, and it turns up in no basilica record or standard Gaudí scholarship. It is better treated as tradition than as established fact. For what it is worth, the basilica’s own description of the bell towers is that they are arranged symmetrically, rising in height towards the centre.
Gaudí’s Approach to Symmetry
What is certain is that a little irregularity would not have troubled Gaudí in the slightest. He took his forms from nature, from trees, from bones, from shells, and from the way weight travels down through a structure, rather than from the fixed, mirror-image symmetry of a classical temple. Nature almost never repeats itself exactly, and you can read the same instinct across Park Güell and Casa Milà. So even a story about Gaudí calmly forgiving an uneven pair of towers feels true to the man, whatever the measuring line would say.
The Glory Façade, Still Unbuilt
The Nativity façade has a quieter sibling that most visitors never think about: the Glory façade, designed as the basilica’s main entrance, facing Carrer de Mallorca. It is still largely unbuilt. Gaudí planned a grand approach to it, a broad stairway up to the doors. Of the three great fronts, it is the last to be finished, and the only one whose final shape is not yet fixed.
There is a nice irony in that, and Opisso felt it on his very first day in the workshop, a boy of twelve, when his father asked whether he was happy with the job.
Yes, but what will I do when the Sagrada Família is finished?
Ricard Opisso, on his first day with Gaudí, 1892
More than 130 years later, the question has still not come due. Step back to the far side of the square and the four Nativity towers close up into a single dense composition, and any difference in their spacing all but disappears. What you are really looking at is a building shaped slowly, by hand, for well over a century, and still, even now, working out how it ends.
Related myBCN Tour
Related topic: The exterior of the Sagrada Família
Tour context: Introduction to the Sagrada Família: Cracking the Basilica Code is a myBCN walking tour of the basilica’s exterior, read from the parks Gaudí designed as viewing points for its façades.
Reference URL: https://dev.mybcn.es/barcelona-walking-tours/sagrada-familia-exterior-tour/