inside My Biggest inspiration

The moment you step through the doors. The experience changes entirely as it becomes less about stone and story as it was with the Facades.

The first thing that hits you isn’t the architecture, it’s the light. Not just light that illuminates, but light that moves. It dances. It pours through the stained glass in waves of colour: warm ambers and reds flooding in from the west, cool blues and greens washing in from the east. It shifts across the stone like water, rising and falling, changing by the minute. It makes the whole space feel alive, lifting your gaze and your spirit with it.

Then there are the columns. Towering and twisting like the trunks of ancient trees. They rise up to support a ceiling that doesn’t feel like a ceiling at all, more like the canopy of a vast forest. Gaudí designed it this way, drawing directly from nature. Each column gets more slender the higher it climbs, just like real trees, until it meets the intricately patterned vaults above. It’s a transformation of stone into something organic, something breathing. You feel as if you’re standing in a basilica carved out of the earth itself, a sacred forest grown from imagination and devotion.

I’m not religious. But the atmosphere inside this space, is undeniably spiritual. There’s a silence here that feels like reverence. Every line, every beam of light, every curve of stone is reaching upwards, searching for something greater. You don’t need to share the faith to feel the belief behind it. The Sagrada Família transcends doctrine. It’s not just about religion, it’s about devotion. Devotion to craft, to vision, to something bigger than ourselves. It’s a reminder that architecture doesn’t just have to be functional, or even just beautiful. It can be emotional. It can hold philosophy. It can speak.

And that’s why I always return. No matter how many times I visit, I leave with the same awe. The Sagrada Família continues to teach me that when the beauty of art is rooted in meaning, it becomes timeless.