Who is Antoni Gaudi's Architecture: The Treasures of Barcelona

Barcelona in the summer is dry, hot and dusty, but stand inside Gaudi's famous church, La Sagrada Familia and you will be transported to a cool forest.

This magnificent church - as yet unfinished - was designed by the Catalan Spanish architect Antoni Gaudi and it is a masterpiece of naturalistic architecture. In the central space, columns shaped like huge trees rise up as if from a forest floor and branch out to a roof decorated with what look like the down-turned faces of giant sunflowers.

On a recent visit to Barcelona I stood at the bottom of these columns and was completely awe-struck by their grace and immensity, and the way the light filtered down through the 'trees'. It reminded me of looking up at the great kauri trees in the Waipoua Forest in Northland, New Zealand.

La Sagrada Familia is located on Carrer de Mallorca in a very busy area of Barcelona. Yet, despite all the noise and rush and the heat of the summer city - usually in the 30s - you pass through the church entrance into a place of amazing coolness and tranquility. There is a quality of stillness in the church such as you find in a beautiful and quiet part of the natural world. To give you an idea of the scale of the building, it is said that when completed the church should be able to accommodate about 14,000 people.

Sagrada Familia by VWorks_Studios
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One of the most challenging aspects of a visit to the church is going up one of its towers.

Gaudi planned eighteen towers for the church and, to date, eight have been built. A lift takes you almost to the top of one of the completed towers and from the lift it is a short climb up a narrow, circular staircase to the very top. I can't tell you what this is like as I didn't make the final ascent - being afraid of heights and not too keen on closed-in spaces, going up in the lift was enough for me.

However, my partner went to the top of the tower and reported back that the views across the city were breathtaking. If you can't manage the final ascent you will not completely miss out; just outside the lift is a small area where you can stand and look out across the roof-tops.

The Casa Mila is an apartment block which was built in the early twentieth century for the Mila family and is now a UNESCO World Heritage site. From the outside, the walls are wave-like and seem to have been hewn roughly out of limestone which probably accounts for the house also being called La Pedrera, which means 'the quarry' in Catalan. There are finely-crafted wrought iron balconies at the windows and strangely-shaped surrealistic chimneys adorning the roof.

Gaudi's Casa Mila by wonglt
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