I am by no means any kind of an expert on trains, tunnels, church architecture, or construction, but something about this just strikes me as a really, really bad idea (emphasis added):
It has survived the death of its architect, a dearth of funding and the destruction of its prototypes during the Spanish civil war. Now the Cathedral of the Sagrada Familia, Antoni GaudÃ's surreal, unfinished opus, faces a new threat: plans to bore a high-speed train tunnel within meters of its foundations."What would possess someone to build a tunnel like this next to the heaviest building in Barcelona, the most visited monument in Spain?" said Jordi Bonet, who leads a team of 20 architects working to complete the 125-year-old basilica.
In a workshop below the building, he paused next to a plaster model of the unbuilt facade and whipped out a yellow tape measure to show how the tunnel would pass just 1.5 meters, or 5 feet, from the cathedral's foundations.
This is the church in question, by the way:
![[Sagrada Familia]](http://farm1.static.flickr.com/49/190869927_869d48f0b4.jpg)
Like I said, I am no expert, but you'd think that protecting a site like that would be considered important. I'm all for a high-speed rail link from Barcelona to Madrid, but couldn't they have found a better route?
