Monastery of Saint Lawrence the Royal of El Escorial

The Monastery of Saint Lawrence the Royal of El Escorial (Monasterio de San Lorenzo el Real de El Escorial), better known as just El Escorial is one of Spain’s most impressive edifices. Built by King Phillip II in the late 16th century, the building was designed to house a church, a monastery, a mausoleum, and the palace for the royal family. One of Phillip’s main motivations was a promise he had made to dedicate a church to Saint Lawrence on the occasion of an important Spanish victory over France that occurred on the feast day of that saint. A second motive was that his father, Charles V, emperor of the largest empire the world had ever known, had expressed the wish that a proper tomb be erected for him. So when Phillip II moved the capital from Toledo to Madrid in 1559 in order to put the capital in the center of the country, he began construction of El Escorial on the site of the slag heap (escorial) of some abandoned iron mines. The construction took place from 1563 to 1584 and resulted in a huge complex that measures 206 x 161 meters and has approximately 1,200 doors and 2,600 windows. Perhaps no other building more faithfully reflects the personality of its owner than this.Phillip II was a deeply religious man, obsessively so in the opinion of many. (It is perhaps understandable, since he spent most of his life in mourning. Seventeen of his close relatives died during his lifetime, including all of his sons but one, and his four wives.) He thus lavished great sums of money on the decoration of the religious parts of the building, while the palace itself was a simple, even austere affair from which Phillip ruled half the world. Subsequent monarchs added some decorative touches to the apartments or installed additional ones, as in the case of the Bourbon apartments. The Pantheon of the Kings, directly below the high altar of the church, contains the remains of almost all the Spanish monarchs from Charles V on (with the kings on the left, queens on the right). The lavishly decorated library contains some 40,000 volumes, and there and elsewhere in the building you discover examples of the works of all the great painters of the 16th century. El Escorial elicits varied reactions from visitors, some seeing it as a morose pile of rock with 2,600 too-small windows, others as a totally unique royal monument built by a unique monarch. There is certainly no denying its interest as a symbol of some important aspects of 16th-century Spain.