Description
You will certainly appreciate this unique experience discovering a significant part of the Spanish history, enjoying the pleasant transfers in our comfortable cars or vans and tasting the delicious Spanish gastronomy.
The tour includes:
All entrance fees of the visited sites
Approximately 1 hour drive from your hotel in Madrid to San Lorenzo de El Escorial
2 hour visit with an official guide at the Monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial
Approximately 1 h drive back to your hotel in Madrid
Customized
All private tours of Citytoursinmadrid can be customized. Send your personal interest to info@citytoursinmadrid.es and we will make a personalized proposal. Suggestions like:
- La silla de Filipe II
- El Bosque Espiritu
The Pride of the Spanish Royalty and World Heritage designation by Unesco
The Monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial raises in an exceptionally charming place in the Sierra de Guadarrama. It was built by King Philip II, a passionate religious man, in the late 16th century.
For its construction he had two major facts in consideration.
The most important reason was the solemn wish of his father, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (who reigned in Spain as King Charles I), for being honoured with a dignified mausoleum.
And he made the promise to consecrate a church to Saint Lawrence for the Spanish victory over France in the battle of Saint Quentin Saint Lawrence's Day in 1557.
The works for the monumental complex started on April 23rd 1563 and these were delegated to Juan Bautista de Toledo, the architect who raised the Basilica of St. Peter, however it was finished by the architect Juan de Herrera in 1584 in less than 21 years.
The result was a magnificent monument which reliably portrays the ideological and artistic narrative from the Spanish Catholic Monarchy of the Golden Age.
El Escorial is beyond being a monastery also a palace, a basilica, a pantheon, a school and a library. In its appearance it looks more like a fortress than a monastery.
Probably there is no other building which could better testimony the character of its creator.
In line with Philip’s II mystic personality, the palace in itself was a very severe and austere place, from which he dominated almost half of the world. Actually, subsequent monarchs embellished their personal apartments with more ornamentation, as well as created more apartments, as the Bourbon lineage did. However Philip II invested considerable funds on the decoration of the ecclesiastical buildings of the complex. The Pantheon of the kings, the burial site for the Spanish kings which lies beneath the Basilica, contains the last five centuries sovereigns’ remains and its walls are finished on Toledo marble magnificently decorated in gold-plated bronze.
All the complex site is decorated with major art works from the most renowned 16th century painters.
