Radio Interview
José Manuel Almuzara took part once again in “Contigo en Casa”, the Radio María Chile programme, in an episode built around a fundamental question: whether architecture can be a path to God. The conversation, broadcast on 23 July 2026, turned on holiness, vocation and the craft of building in the life of Antoni Gaudí. It is the second interview the Chilean Catholic station has devoted to him in a matter of days.
Radio María Chile brought José Manuel Almuzara back to its microphones on 23 July 2026, within the programme “Contigo en Casa”. The Barcelona architect, who in 1992 co-founded the Association for the Beatification of Antoni Gaudí and is the author of “Gaudí, el arquitecto del alma” (Roca Editorial, 2026), thus accepted a second invitation from the station, distinct from the interview it had aired on 17 July. The Chilean Catholic radio’s persistence answers the interest left by his recent tour of the country, and the episode was framed by a question at once simple and demanding: can architecture be a path to God?
Almuzara’s answer runs through Gaudí’s own biography, in which craft and faith ended up inseparable. The Catalan architect understood his work as an offering and conceived the Sagrada Família as a prayer raised in stone, devoting to it the last decades of his life. Hence the conversation dwelt on vocation understood as a calling: not a professional career one chooses, but a task received and returned to God. Seen in this light, architecture ceases to be mere technique and becomes a language capable of leading whoever contemplates it towards the Creator.
The programme’s other thread was holiness, presented not as an exception reserved for a few but as a path that opens up in ordinary life and in work well done. Gaudí died on 10 June 1926, struck by a tram as he was on his way to pray, and that final detail sums up an existence ordered to faith. Almuzara has maintained for decades that his example speaks to architects, artists and workers of every trade, because it shows that holiness does not require abandoning one’s profession but living it as service. In a country that preserves in Rancagua the only chapel designed by Gaudí in the Americas, that message found a particular echo.
The broadcast comes at a decisive moment for the architect’s cause of beatification. Pope Francis declared him Venerable on 14 April 2025, and the recognition of a miracle would be the step opening the way to his beatification, a process Almuzara has accompanied since 1992. That a Catholic station on the other side of the Atlantic should devote two consecutive programmes to Gaudí shows how far his figure has ceased to be a Barcelona matter and become a shared spiritual heritage. In the year of the centenary of his death, the question that gave the episode its title remains the best summary of his legacy.