Royal Seat of San Lorenzo de El Escorial

The Escorial Monastery is located in the small town of Escorial, about 50 kilometers northwest of Madrid. say. Combining abbey, palace, museum and mausoleum, this World Heritage-listed monastery was built by Philip II to commemorate the defeat of the French army at the Battle of Saint Quentin in 1557. Named a monastery, it is actually a palace, a church, a museum, a library, a school, a garden and a mausoleum. It is magnificent and breathtaking! The main body of the monastery complex is the monastery. When the monastery was built, the Spanish royal family lived here. When the Franco-Spanish War broke out in 1808, the royal family abandoned the temple and fled. Because the builder Philip II was a very devout believer, the architectural style of the palace on the ground part of the monastery is very strict. Most of the furnishings and frescoes in the palace are related to religious themes, and there are tens of thousands of precious ancient Christian manuscripts in the king's private library. Royal Mausoleums The underground monastery houses the magnificent royal tombs, where most of the kings of Spain rest. There are three sets of coffins on the walls on both sides of the rotunda, in which 26 marble coffins of Spanish kings are embedded, and the names of the kings buried inside are engraved on the coffins. In other tombs, there are many white marble tombs of various shapes, which house the remains of royal families such as queens, princes, and princesses. The Painting Museum is also one of the largest painting museums in the world, with hundreds of oil paintings of representative painters from the Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution. In addition, there are vast open courtyards on the northwest sides of the monastery, and some closed gardens on the east side, which were built to provide resting places for members of the royal family at that time. The building on the west side of the monastery is now turned into a primary school and is not open to the public.