The story of this place
Philip II ordered El Escorial built between 1563 and 1584 to fulfil a vow after his victory at Saint-Quentin on Saint Lawrence's day; its gridiron floor plan echoes the grill on which the saint was martyred. Part monastery, palace, basilica, library and royal mausoleum, its austere grey mass expresses the severe Catholic power of an empire on which the sun never set. From a modest bedroom beside the altar Philip governed the world, dying there in 1598 riddled with gout and fever. Beneath the basilica the Pantheon of Kings holds nearly every Spanish monarch since Charles V in bronze-and-marble sepulchres, a dynasty stacked in a single dark chamber.