Whereas an enormous amount of literature exists describing the preparation of the well known high T c superconductor YBa 2Cu 3O 7 as a single phase compound with a transition temperature T c∼92 K, very few reports have been published on the preparation of the rare earth analog compound LaBa 2Cu 3O 7. This report describes the preparation of LaBa 2Cu 3O 7 compound by sol–gel technique. A single phase compound that showed an orthorhombicity of ∼5×10 −3 and a T c∼93 K was obtained. The fluorination of this compound did not alter the values of neither the lattice parameters nor the T c.