Digital Press
José Manuel Almuzara took his book «Gaudí, el arquitecto del alma» to Valencia for two events on consecutive days. On Monday 19 October 2026 he gave a lecture to a full room at the parish of San Josemaría Escrivá, and on Tuesday 20 October he presented the book at the library of the Territorial College of Architects of Valencia (CTAV).
The first event was the lecture «Gaudí, el arquitecto del alma» («Gaudí, the Architect of the Soul»), which José Manuel Almuzara gave on Monday 19 October 2026 at 8 p.m. at the parish of San Josemaría Escrivá in Valencia, a Catholic parish dedicated to Saint Josemaría Escrivá, the founder of Opus Dei. Almuzara is an architect, has presided over the Association for the Beatification of Antoni Gaudí since 1992 and is the author of the book that gave the talk its title. The room was full. The poster for the event carried a sentence by Gaudí himself: «To do things well, you need first love, and second, technique». The quotation puts love ahead of craft, and that order sums up Almuzara's reading of the architect of the Sagrada Família.
During the lecture, Almuzara drew on a projection of quotations from Gaudí. Several of them dealt with nature as the architect's teacher and with his capacity for observation, two ideas the speaker has developed on other occasions. They were also at the heart of his lecture «Gaudí i la natura» («Gaudí and Nature») at El Círcol de Reus, part of the centenary events, where he explained that Gaudí learned to observe as a child in Riudoms and that he discovered in nature the laws he later carried into his architecture. In Valencia, the projected quotations let the audience follow Gaudí's thinking in his own words. At the end, Almuzara signed copies of the book.
The next day, Tuesday 20 October, at 7 p.m., Almuzara presented «Gaudí, el arquitecto del alma» at the library of the CTAV, the Territorial College of Architects of Valencia, the professional body of architects in Valencia (Spain). Mar Alonso, a board member of the CTAV, gave the welcome. The college announced the event on its website, which gives the book's details: it is published by Roca Editorial, came out in 2026 and runs to 224 pages. The evening before, Almuzara had spoken at a parish, and that day he spoke in the house of his own profession. The venue made sense, since the author is an architect and his book is about another architect, whose work is still studied a hundred years after his death.
Both events took place in the centenary year of Gaudí's death in 1926. The Church declared him Venerable in April 2025, in recognition of the heroic nature of his virtues, and beatification now requires the recognition of a miracle. In September, the press reported that the Vatican was examining an alleged healing attributed to his intercession. Almuzara has devoted more than thirty years to this cause, and the title of his book sums up an idea he has defended throughout that time, that Gaudí's work springs from his faith. In Valencia, a parish and the architects' college opened their doors to him on two consecutive evenings.