BARCELONA MONDAY

This week has been one of rich experiences. For as part of my voluntary UNESCO work I had the opportunity the visit Barcelona to talk to colleagues there and as part of that visit I also had the opportunity of a private tour of Gaudi's Sagrada Familia Cathedral.



Gaudi’s great Catalan edifice, excites strong emotions. Like the translucent Barcelona light it cannot be ignored: can never become merely another townscape. It demands urgent attention, regardless whether you prefer your Cathedrals much as the medieval builders of the high perpendicular left them: light transfixed in an echoing perfection, with spires that claw at the sky.



Not for nothing, then, that Gaudi’s defining creation, still unfinished after one hundred and twenty seven years, should have been created a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Our busy and ephemeral age will leave few monuments behind when finally it crumbles into dust. Apart from massive concrete accretions there will be little enough to remind future generations that our epoch can boast those who have striven to weave beauty and complexity from stone and light and who, too, have reached toward the heavens.



The Sagrada Familia - the name means Holy Family in Catalan - has already survived great turbulence. War, fire, political apathy, poverty are only some of the ills which its creators have fought since work on the cathedral commenced in 1882. Now at last, with its World Heritage status and annual visits surpassing the 3 million mark, the great work is finally in sight of completion.



Gaudi himself died in 1926 with little more than the great carved facade with its four iconic bell towers completed. That was a shock to a project struggling for funds, though not as great as the disaster of July 1936. Two days after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War almost every church in Barcelona fell victim to anti-clerical rioters. The Sagrada Familia did not escape. The works were burned. Gaudi’s studio with all his drawings and the complex geometrical models from which his works took shape went up in flames. Building work halted for a generation.



We ascended nearly seventy metres above the Barcelona streets and moved like so many Quasimodos among the skeletons of the high Cathedral architecture where the immense sculptured finials of fruit and flowers are reminiscent of some far off Aztec vision. Still far above us the mighty decorated bell towers soared against the blue Mediterranean sky. It as a long way up and a long way down.



The work proceeds from models recreated from pieces of the originals, burnt and smashed by fire. Gaudi’s obsession with geometry makes it possible to recreate a whole section from the smallest part. The new models, still on Gaudi’s one to ten scale are fitted around the fragments of the original and so manage to look like plants regenerated from from a small piece of rhizome. The work has been a triumph of detection, a fitting tribute to the conquering nature of faith and human dedication.



Yet the Cathedral faces one last challenge. What has survived war and destruction to become a World Heritage site risks now being, quite literally, undermined. For a long time there have been plans to build a transportation tunnel underneath Barcelona that will pass within two metres of the Cathedral’s Foundations.



The ground on which the Cathedral stands is not good. It is feared that if the tunnel excavations do not give rise to subsidence, then years of vibration will one day cause the great bell towers of Sagrada Famila to collapse.



Many species of engineer have looked at the threat and have given their opinion. Some are re-assuring. Others take a more sombre view. But to re-route the tunnel would be costly for work has already started. The tunnel is at the outskirts of Barcelona itself. Only high politics can now halt or deflect its relentless advance.