The Apse and the Crypt: Where Gaudí Lies
Why is it significant?
Walk along the back of the church on Carrer de Provença and look at the rounded wall of the apse, ringed with pointed pinnacles. It looks more medieval than the rest, and that is no accident: you are looking at the oldest part of the building, and under it, the crypt.
Key Facts
| Place | The Apse and the Crypt: Where Gaudí Lies |
|---|---|
| Address | Carrer de Provença 450, 08013 Barcelona, Spain |
| Geo Coordinates | 41.40400, 2.17390 |
| Part of Walk | Gaudí's Endless Temple to Domènech's Garden Hospital: Sagrada Família & Sant Pau, Barcelona |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk along the back of the church on Carrer de Provença and look at the rounded wall of the apse, ringed with pointed pinnacles. It looks more medieval than the rest, and that is no accident: you are looking at the oldest part of the building, and under it, the crypt.
The first stone was laid on the 19th of March 1882, Saint Joseph's day, and the first architect was not Gaudí at all. Francisco de Paula del Villar planned a fairly ordinary neo-Gothic church. He quarrelled with the promoters and left, and in 1883 the job went to a thirty-one-year-old architect with very little to his name. Antoni Gaudí would spend the next forty-three years here.
By the end of his life the temple had swallowed him completely. He dressed shabbily, lived for his work, and in his last months slept in his studio on the site. On the 7th of June 1926, walking to evening prayers, he was hit by a tram on Gran Via. Nobody recognised the old man in worn clothes, and he was taken, like a pauper, to the old Hospital de la Santa Creu in the Raval. He died there three days later. Half of Barcelona followed his coffin, and he was buried here, in the crypt, in the chapel of Our Lady of Mount Carmel.
Ten years later, in July 1936, as the Civil War broke out, the crypt was set on fire and Gaudí's studio was ransacked. Drawings and photographs burned, and his plaster models were smashed to pieces. For decades, patient architects have reassembled those fragments like a jigsaw, and much of what has been built since rests on them.
The Church has opened a cause for Gaudí's beatification, and in 2025 the Vatican declared him Venerable, the first step on that road. Keep an eye on the pinnacles of the apse: snails, lizards and other little creatures crawl down them, a sculptor's joke in a very serious building. Now carry on round the corner, cross Carrer de la Marina into Plaça de Gaudí, and find the pond.