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BARCELONA — Javier Marín, a 63-year-old sculptor from Uruapan, Michoacán, confirmed Monday that he is a finalist to complete the Glory Façade of the Sagrada Família — the main entrance to Gaudí’s 143-year-old basilica and the most theologically loaded piece of real estate in Spain.
If selected, the face greeting every visitor to Spain’s most beloved monument will have been designed by someone from Mexico. This is, historians note, almost exactly the opposite of what Spain spent three centuries doing, except in that case nobody sent an invitation.
To understand why this is ironic, some context: beginning in 1521, Spanish colonisers systematically demolished the great monuments of indigenous Mexican civilisation and replaced them with Catholic churches, using the rubble of the originals as building material. The Metropolitan Cathedral on Mexico City’s main square was constructed directly on top of the Templo Mayor, the sacred heart of the Aztec empire, using its own stones. In Cholula, Puebla, Spanish priests built a church on the summit of the largest pyramid ever constructed by human hands. They did this across an entire continent for three hundred years and appear to have genuinely expected no one to bring it up again.
Marín has not brought it up. He doesn’t need to. A separate Mexican architect, Mauricio Cortés Sierra, has already installed Gaudí’s cross at the basilica’s highest point — 172.5 metres above Barcelona. Between them, Mexico now controls the top and the front of Spain’s most visited monument.
“It’s amazing that I might be able to do this,” Marín told reporters, which is also, more or less, what Spain said in 1521. The key difference is that Marín was formally invited by the board of trustees. He has a letter. The conquistadors did not have a letter.
The board votes in April. The Templo Mayor is still underneath the cathedral. Everyone is being very gracious about all of it.
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