The Tree of Life

Looking up at La Sagrada Família from the street, the soaring spires and dense carvings immediately overwhelm your gaze. But if you let your eyes linger long enough at the very crown of the Nativity Facade, you’ll find a vast green tree covered with white doves—this is the Tree of Life.

This Tree of Life was designed by Gaudí and completed around 1930. It sits at the crown of the Nativity Facade, beside the “Jesus” tower (the tallest central spire). The tree is modeled on a cypress, which in Christian tradition symbolizes immortality and the soul’s ascent to heaven. At the tree’s apex is a gilded Greek Chi-Rho monogram—the ancient abbreviation for Jesus Christ.

The white doves are the tree’s most striking feature. Count carefully and you’ll find approximately thirty doves, each perching or spreading wings in a unique posture. When Gaudí commissioned the workshop to produce them, he required that no two doves could share the same pose—because in reality, no two birds in flight ever move identically.

Besides the cypress, the Tree of Life has another biblical identity—the forbidden tree planted by God at the center of Eden in Genesis. Whoever eats its fruit shall live forever, but humanity was expelled from paradise after being tempted to eat from the Tree of Knowledge instead. Gaudí deliberately chose a cypress rather than an apple tree because he wanted to represent eternal salvation after redemption, not temptation before the fall.

In 2010, after a major renovation phase, the Sagrada Família preservation team spent eighteen months conducting detailed 3D laser scanning and material analysis of the Tree of Life. They found that improper water drainage above had caused slow erosion in a small section of the trunk’s base. Stone masons repaired it using a specially formulated mortar matching the original 1930 composition, ensuring the tree can stand for another century.