Sagrada Familia to pay £32m for building for 136 years without a permit

Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia cathedral has been landed with a £31.8m bill for building without a permit for 136 years.

The construction of the cathedral, designed by artist Antoni Gaudi, began in 1882 and has continued ever since.

However, the builders of the cathedral never actually obtained a valid construction permit, a fact that has been at the centre of a long-running dispute between church officials and Barcelona’s city authorities.

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The lack of permit means the cathedral “is not overseen by any authority to ensure that construction complies with building norms”, says El Pais.

Last week, Barcelona’s mayor Ada Colau tweeted that the city had reached an “historic accord” with the church’s trustees which will see the basilica pay out €36m (£31.8m) over the next ten years.

The lion’s share - €22m (£19m) - will go towards improving the city’s overburdened public transport network, while the rest of the long-deferred payment will go towards security costs and redeveloping the area around the cathedral.

“In return for the money, the authorities will officially regularise the work and the basilica will be able to formalise its permit to complete the design,” architecture website Dezeen reports.

By the time of Gaudi’s death in 1926, only a quarter of planned work on the vast undertaking - which includes 18 towers, the highest of them 170m tall - had been completed, says The Culture Trip.

The cathedral now has a tentative completion date of 2026 - 144 years after the first stones were laid - to coincide with the centenary of Gaudi’s death. In 2010, Pope Benedict XVI consecrated the building as a basilica of the Catholic Church, a status that can only be conferred by a pope.

Despite being unfinished, the edifice is the city’s most iconic landmark, drawing more than three million visitors per year. In 1984, the cathedral’s facade and crypt, where Gaudi is interred, were designated a Unesco World Heritage Site.