Royal Monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial

Philip II's first victory as king came at Saint-Quentin in Picardy on 10 August 1557, the feast of St Lawrence. The following year his father, Charles I of Spain, died at Yuste, having altered his will to ask his son to raise a new foundation to hold his tomb, away from the burial places of his forebears. A commission of doctors, architects and stonemasons searched the Sierra de Guadarrama, and in November 1560 chose ground near the Fuente de Blasco Sancho.

The king had named Juan Bautista de Toledo, lately of St Peter's in Rome, as his architect-royal in 1559. In 1561 he moved his capital from Toledo to Madrid and entrusted the monastery to the Hieronymites, while Juan Bautista began the general design known as the Traza Universal. The cornerstone was laid on 23 April 1563, in the foundations of the convent refectory.

Philip's instruction to his architects was brief: "simplicity in the construction, severity in the whole, nobility without arrogance, majesty without ostentation." On 22 April 1567 he signed the Charter of Foundation, dedicating the house to St Lawrence out of personal devotion and in memory of the mercy and victory received on the saint's feast day, a wording that stops short of naming the battle. Juan Bautista de Toledo died on 19 May 1567. Direction passed to the Italian Giovanni Battista Castello el Bergamasco from 1567 to 1569, and in 1572 Toledo's pupil Juan de Herrera took over the reorganisation.

Herrera cut the number of towers and closed the Patio de los Reyes with the double façade housing the Royal Library, and he replaced the church's planned Latin cross with a Greek cross under a single dome. Only with the closed façade and the dropped towers did the plan take on the grill shape traditionally read as a tribute to St Lawrence, martyred on a gridiron; the more persuasive account traces the layout to Flavius Josephus's description of the Temple of Solomon. The last stone was laid on 13 September 1584, twenty-one years after the first, and the basilica was finished in 1586. The style the work established is known as Herrerian.

Philip II gave his own papers to the foundation and sent ambassadors across his empire to buy more. An inventory of 1576 counted 4,546 volumes, and that year the king bought the library of Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, some 850 codices and more than a thousand printed books. He kept over four hundred titles banned by the Inquisition, holding that they should be open to experts and not to those likely to misunderstand them. Philip III ordered that a copy of every book published within the empire be sent to El Escorial, and Admiral Luis Fajardo brought back the Zaydani library taken in his war with Sultan Muley Zidán.

Fire swept the library in 1671 and destroyed some 5,280 handwritten codices; the main hall, where the printed books stood, was saved. The priest Antonio de San José spent more than twenty-five years reclassifying what remained and counted 45,000 books. Under the Bourbons the buying stopped, and volumes were carried off to France and to the kings' own libraries.

Beneath the royal chapel lies the octagonal Royal Pantheon, twenty-six marble sepulchres holding the Habsburg and Bourbon monarchs from Charles I onwards, except Philip V, Ferdinand VI and Amadeus of Savoy. The Pantheon of the Princes, nine chapels for princes, princesses and consorts who were not parents of monarchs, was completed in 1888; thirty-seven of its sixty niches are filled. Alfonso XIII was brought from Santa Maria in Monserrato in Rome in 1980. His wife, Victoria Eugenie of Battenberg, was interred in 2011.

The Peninsular War brought the monastery sack and exclaustration. Hieronymites returned in 1814, most left again between 1820 and 1824 during the Liberal Triennium, and on 1 December 1837 the last 150 walked out as the laws disentailing church property took effect. The Piarist fathers held the whole monastery from 1872 to 1875; in 1885 Alfonso XII gave it to the Order of Saint Augustine, who hold it still.

The site is managed by Patrimonio Nacional and has been protected as a bien de interés cultural since 3 June 1931; UNESCO listed it on 2 November 1984. The boarding school continues as the Real Colegio Alfonso XII, the library holds more than 40,000 volumes, and more than 500,000 people visit a year. A two-year reorganisation begun in 2024, funded with 6.5m euros from the EU, moved the visitor entrance to the Patio de los Reyes and set about reopening the dormant painting and architecture galleries.