Escorial

Escorial, or, less correctly, ESCURIAL, a royal palace, mansoleum, and monastery of Spain, 31 miles NW. of Madrid, on the south-eastern slope of the Sierra Guadarrama, at an altitude of 3700 feet. This immense pile of buildings, built of dark-gray granite, has a stern, austere, forbidding appearance, which is not at all relieved by the bleak, wind-swept, mountainous region in which it stands. It owes its existence to Philip II., who erected it partly to provide a royal burying-place for the kings of Spain, partly to commemorate his victory over the French at St Quentin on St Lawrence's day, 10th August 1557. Its general shape is that of a quadrangular parallelogram, 706 feet long by 550 broad, with a smaller square projecting from the east side. The current belief is that it was planned to represent a gridiron, the object upon which St Lawrence was martyred; but this has been questioned. At any rate, each corner of the parallelogram is fenced with a tower, about 200 feet high; and above the church, in the centre of the pile, rises a cupola, its summit 312 feet from the floor. The first stone of the edifice was laid in 1563, the architect being Toledo, after whose death in 1567 his pupil Herrera carried on the work to its completion in 1584. The finest individual building is the church, a square basilica, in the shape of a Greek cross, and in the Doric order of architecture. It was formerly rich in paintings; and, although in 1837 a hundred of the best were removed to Madrid, there still remain specimens by Coello, Carvajal, Tibaldi, Zuccaro, Luca Giordano, Trezzo, Zurbaran, Ribera, Tintoretto, Titian, and Veronese. The Pantheon, or royal mausoleum, an octagonal chamber beneath the church, contains the bones of the kings of Spain from Charles V., father of Philip II., onwards (except Philip V. and Ferdinand VI.) to Alfonso XII., with queens, regents, and mothers of kings; the rest of the royal family, with Don John of Austria, are buried in the 'Panteon de los Infantes.' The library, once one of the richest in Europe, but greatly diminished by a fire in 1691, and by thefts by the French soldiery in 1808, still contains 32,143 vols. and 4611 valuable MSS., including 1905 written in Arabic. In the palace the most interesting apartment is the cell of Philip II., in which he spent his last days. The Escorial was again greatly injured by fire in 1872.