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It’s like those stories about literary people confessing they have never read the Catcher in the Rye, or movie buffs who’ve never seen The Godfather. I was the Hispanophile and Barcelona fan that had never visited the Sagrada Familia.
The basilica of the Holy Family (Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Familia, to give it its correct name) is the project to which Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí (1852-1926) devoted the last 15 years of his life. To say it’s a popular spot in Barcelona would be an understatement: this is the second most-visited church in Christendom after St Peter’s in Rome and, together with the Prado museum in Madrid and the Alhambra in Granada, a “sight” that habitually tops the bucket lists of travelers in Spain.
Yet I had been avoiding it all my life. Why? Partly because I was reluctant to join the tourist throng, fearful of being reduced to the level of a humble sightseer rather than the connoisseur of Spanish culture that I imagined myself to be.