The Royal Monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial is a complex that includes a royal palace, a basilica, a pantheon, a library, a school and a monastery. It is located in the Spanish town of San Lorenzo de El Escorial, in the Community of Madrid, and was built between 1563 and 1584.
It was considered, since the end of the XVI century, the Eighth Wonder of the World, as much for its size and functional complexity as for its enormous symbolic value. Its architecture marked the passage from the Renaissance plateresque to the unornamented classicism. Huge work, of great monumentality, is also a receptacle of the other arts.
Legend also says that it was built to cover the 7th door of hell, Felipe second was walking through its huge corridors, and a curious note is that when he was dying, he changed the paintings in his room for pictures of the forest with terrible demonic scenes
