Pretty quickly, this pay-to-pray arrangement gave way to a less ecclesiastical approach. In 1915, the Sagrada Família started charging a visitor’s fee—currently twenty-six euros. It is now the largest tourist attraction on the Iberian Peninsula, drawing more people than the Museo del Prado, in Madrid. Last year, nearly five million visitors came to see the basilica’s dizzyingly decorated interior; another nineteen million milled around outside, probably because they could not get tickets, and gazed at its equally ornate façade, with its Byzantine-looking tiling, windows shaped like honeycomb cells, and clumps of multicolored ceramic grapes. Last year, the church took in almost a hundred and thirty-four million euros. Buoyed by a tourism boom that began with the Barcelona Olympics, in 1992, and paused only for the COVID-19 pandemic, the site may be one of the only large construction projects in the world which pays for itself. In recent years, the Sagrada Família has collected far more money than it has spent.journey-inline-newsletterinline-newsletter