The perfect place to escape from the city crowds is El Escorial Palace, just 50 kilometers from Madrid. Surrounded by a spacious forest, it looks like a place from a fairy tale. Queens, princesses and kings really lived here. The palace is located in the city of San Lorenzo. This place is the real residence of the Spanish kings. On this grandiose complex there are royal palace, a monastery, a pantheon, a basilica, a library, a museum, a hospital, a university and a school.
This complex is of the greatest cultural and historical significance in Spain, which was once both a royal palace and a monastery. In the main building, Philip II was the only monarch who ever lived there. The monastery in the royal complex is connected with the order of the monastery of St. Augustine, and it served as a boarding school for a time.
King Philip II hired the architect Juan Batista de Toledo to build this complex. This architect also worked on the Basilica of St. Peter in Rome, and there he served the king, and Philip II appointed him king architect in 1559. El Escorial Palace was conceived as the center of the Christian center of Spain. El Escorial is visited annually by half a million tourists, and UNESCO declared this place a cultural heritage in 1984. Basilica of St. Lorenzo is located in the middle of the palace, in front of which you can visit the beautiful royal gardens and labyrinths of hedges.
The interior of the palace is very well preserved. The palace houses a reliquary with a collection of over 7.500 items, which Philip II donated to the monastery, and is one of the largest reliquaries in the entire Christian world. Relics in the form of heads, arms, pyramids, swords are found throughout the complex, and the most beautiful ones are housed in the monastery.
