Little was left in the workshops but shattered plaster.

It was the summer of 1936 and Catalonia was alight with revolutionary fervour. After a failed coup d’etat against the left-wing Republican government, Spain had fallen into civil war and Barcelona into the hands of the anarchists.

Across the city, churches were targeted as decades of accumulated resentment against clerical authoritarianism was unleashed - and the revolutionaries made no exception for the strange, half-finished church on the north-eastern edge of town, the final masterpiece of an architect once revered in Barcelona.

Antoni Gaudí had been dead for more than a decade but his disciples were carefully carrying out his vision based on the many models and drawings he had left, and it was these that the radicals targeted.