AINEWS
Lego's 12,060-piece Sagrada Família set encodes the basilica's 140-year build order
Pre orders opened 4 June 2026, two days before the centennial of Gaudí's death, with general sale set for 1 November at $799.99.
Pre orders opened 4 June 2026, two days before the centennial of Gaudí's death, with general sale set for 1 November at $799.99.
The most interesting thing about Lego's new 12,060-piece Sagrada Família set is not its size. It is the instructions. The set is engineered so that builders assemble the basilica the way Antoni Gaudí built the real one: crypt and apse first, then the Nativity façade, then the Passion façade, and only at the end the six towers that would define the church's silhouette. Each numbered bag is a compressed chapter of a 140-year construction history.
Lego unveiled the model on 4 June 2026, two days before the centennial of Gaudí's death on 10 June 1926. According to the Lego Group's official press release, the set carries product number 21065, retails at $799.99 in the United States, and goes on general sale on 1 November 2026 after a roughly five-month pre-order window. Independent coverage by New Atlas corroborates the dates, the piece count, and the dimensions.
At 12,060 pieces, this is the largest Lego building set to date by piece count, a designation the company makes in its own release. That is a manufacturer claim rather than an audited record, and the marketing occasion is unmistakable. The Architecture line has long been positioned for adult builders and travel-minded hobbyists, and a 172.5-meter basilica is a natural showpiece. The Sagrada Família set joins the lineage of the Taj Mahal and the US Capitol Building kits, both of which sit in the same premium tier.
The Sagrada Família itself is a strange subject for a model. Ground broke in 1882, and Gaudí took over the design a year later. He worked on the project for the next 43 years, until his death on 10 June 1926, and the church remained unfinished. Construction has continued under a succession of architects since. The Lego build honors that arc in the order of its bags. Builders start in the crypt, where the actual crews began, then move to the apse Gaudí completed first. The Nativity façade comes next, the east-facing work that established his voice. The Passion façade follows, the harder, more austere face Gaudí sketched in his later years. The set ends at the towers, which give the basilica its 172.5-meter (566-foot) height and its status as the world's tallest church.
The price is a real barrier. At $799.99, with equivalent list prices of £649.99 in the United Kingdom and €749.99 in the eurozone, the set is not a casual purchase, and Lego rates it for builders 18 and up. The 24-inch finished height and 18.5-by-15-inch footprint also make it a commitment of shelf space rather than a desk toy. For a builder who can absorb the cost, though, the sequence is the point: the model is finished when the towers are placed, in the same structural order that took Catalan craftsmen a century and a half.
Designer Rok Žgalin Kobe, quoted in Lego's release, described the challenge of balancing scale and precision against a building that is still under construction. The quote is a marketing pull-quote, but the underlying point is real. A Lego set for a still-unfinished building has to decide what "finished" means, and the answer, baked into the bag order, is that the church is finished when the towers go up. The Glory façade, the eastern sacristy, and the long-anticipated main entrance remain for a future set, or for the actual crews, who expect to wrap the building sometime in the coming decade.
What to watch: Lego has not said how, or whether, the Glory façade and the eastern sacristy, both of which appear in the set's build sequence, will get follow-up treatment as separate kits. The 1 November on-sale date will be the first real test of whether the adult-builder market shows up at launch in the same volumes that other Lego flagship releases have historically generated.