As you may recall, when last we visited the Sagrada Família, there was a discouragingly long and slow-moving line of people waiting to gain entry. While we’d wanted to see the interior, we didn’t want to spend a good portion of the day waiting to do so, and we resolved to return later. That evening, as we were recovering from our exertions of that eventful day, it occurred to us that other in-demand European attractions offered on-line reservations that had saved us a lot of waiting time. We wondered whether there was a Sagrada Família website, and whether this hypothetical website featured on-line reservations. We cranked up the netbook and checked, and as it turned out, there was, and it did. We quickly signed up, selecting a time during the morning of our last day in Barcelona. We had to pay in advance, by credit card. We were sent tickets in the form of a PDF file, which needed to be printed. Unfortunately we had neglected to pack the all-in-one, so we had to figure out how to get the tickets printed. We put the file on a USB drive and asked the front desk if they could help, and they said sure, asking out of curiosity what they were printing. We told them and they seemed surprised that this was possible, leading us to suspect that on-line ticketing was something new for the Sagrada Família. The desk attendant printed the tickets without any problems, and we packed them away to await the appointed time.

On arriving at the church following our quick visit to La Boqueria, we noted a line of people very similar in length to the one we’d seen previously. We followed it around to the Passion Façade entrance, but didn’t see any obvious entry point for people with reservations among the waiting throngs. Off to the right was an unfrequented booth with a bored-looking attendant. We figured it to be an information booth, and we went over to see if the attendant could answer our question. We were prepared for a complicated explanation, but the attendant just glanced at our printout and waved us in through the perimeter fence. I’d be surprised if the reservation system is still this quick and easy (people must have discovered it by now), but it’s got to be better than standing in that line.

On passing through the gate, we found ourselves to be much closer to the Passion Façade than we’d been a couple of days earlier, and we spent a little time close-up with Subirachs' statues.



We entered the church through a door directly under the façade and found ourselves in a forest. A forest with a great number of very tall trees, and a canopy of gigantic flowers. All apparently made of stone or concrete. But there was also stained glass, so it had to be a church.

While getting our bearings we noticed a short line of people near the entry door. They appeared to be waiting for an elevator. It seemed obvious that the elevator must ascend one of the towers. We figured the line would only get longer as the day went on, so we got in line while the wait was still short, planning to explore the church more after our tower adventure. As it turned out, we figured right about all of this, but the elevator ride, while not expensive, was not free either. There was an elevator attendant with a cash box from which she was able to make change. But the trip was well worth the cost. The elevator took us part way up the rightmost tower above the Passion Façade, the tower named after the apostle Philip. We were able to use a narrow stairway to walk further up the tower, and we had a nice view through the small tower openings of the Nativity Façade towers across the way, as well as the construction in progress on the top of the church.



And in the directions in which there were no towers in the way, we had a fine view of Barcelona.



After enjoying the view for awhile we walked across to the next tower over, this one named after the apostle Thomas. We had a good look at the interior of the tower of Thomas. The towers are hollow and were built to hold gigantic tubular bells, with the openings in the towers slanted downward, to direct the sounds at the populace. But looking up at the interior apex of the Thomas tower, we found that someone had cheated and installed loudspeakers instead.



Eventually we spiraled down a stairway between the tower exterior and an inner shell, and returned to the interior of the church.

Back inside the church, we had some time to wander around and look at the work that had been completed and the work still in progress. The interior appeared to be much closer to completion than the exterior. (This impression was to be validated a few months later, when the church would be consecrated by Pope Benedict XVI on November 7, 2010, in a ceremony attended by King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofía among many others.) We looked at the many treelike columns, which were made of varying heights and diameters, and which were branched near their tops. Apparently Gaudí extensively studied the forces involved in the structure of the church, and came up with an arrangement of columns (many of which aren’t quite vertical) that can support the building without need of buttressing. Or such is the idea, anyway. (So far, so good, but there were ten more towers yet to come.)



We also looked more closely at the stained glass. This is mainly the work of a contemporary Catalan artist named Joan Vila-Grau, and is quite abstract compared to more traditional stained glass. The colors seem to follow a general pattern of lighter blues and greens near the top and darker reds and oranges near the bottom, maybe to symbolize the sky vs. the earth. Or maybe the glory of heaven vs. the flames of perdition. Or maybe the observer is supposed to make up his or her own mind. Some of the windows have words embedded in them. They’re probably scriptural, but I couldn’t make out whether they were Latin or Catalan or something else. The colors were pretty, though.



In the front and center position of the church there was construction in progress that had to be the altar. Above the altar was a platform on which a worker was busy with a framework that we later discovered to be the basic structure of a baldachin of Gaudí’s design. A baldachin is a canopy sometimes built above altars, and this one was completed by the time of Pope Benedict’s visit. And beautifully, judging from the pictures of the event that have been posted on the Sagrada Família website. Nearby were some distinctive spiral staircases.


We exited the building through one of the doors in the Nativity Façade, where we spent a few minutes examining some of the façade’s details.





On the way out we passed through a small museum which had an interesting selection of drawings, photographs and models related to the church’s construction. At one point there was a window into the crypt, and Gaudí’s tomb could be seen if we looked downward at a sharp angle.



The museum exit spat us out next to a crowded gift shop back on the Passion Façade side of the church. We bought a guidebook and a t-shirt with a Gaudí lizard on it, and then we took a last look at the towers and boarded the Metro for a last foray into the old town.