Accompanied by a choir of 800 singers this Sunday, Pope Benedict XVI will consecrate what is arguably the most eccentrically majestic cathedral in the world. The brainchild of the inimitable Catalan architect Antoni Gaudi, Sagrada Familia has been a work-in-progress for almost 130 years, its gloomy, spindly spires a draw for 2.5 million visitors in 2009.
Supporters hope the event is a prelude to Gaudi's beatification, unprecedented for an architect; they say that the hermetic master lived a life of "heroic virtue," his last dozen years spent cloistered in an on-site workshop. After a trolley killed him in 1926, his associates continued with his plans until a decade later, when anarchists burned and destroyed many of his models and plans during the Spanish Civil War.
Around two decades later, work resumed, and in the medieval tradition of cathedrals requiring generations of labour, the project is now slated for completion in 2026, a century after Gaudi's death. But Gaudi himself might have believed there to be no rush on it. Legend has it that when asked about his painstaking pace, he replied, "My client is not in a hurry."