[sandypossum]

It's even more fantastic up close and personal. We visited it about 8 years ago. Wherever you are in it (in the main hall of the cathedral; up the top of one of the steeples; on one of the bridges connecting the steeples; on a balcony hanging out of one of the steeples) you can see so many wonderful little details that you can only see close up. There are little snails, and birds and flowers... some carved in stone, some with mosaic covering. You could only see them close up, not from the ground.

Gaudi was completed obsessed with it, and he was pretty loopy in his last years by the sound of it, but it doesn't change the fact that this is the most wonderful building I've ever seen up close, and that includes some beauties like the Taj Mahal and the Forbidden City. I prefer its assymetry and random bits of beauty to the streamlined, rhythmic beauty of the older monuments.