Royal Monastery of Santa María de Guadalupe
Real Monasterio de Santa María de Guadalupe
- UNESCO World Heritage
Interesting facts
- A lantern that Don John of Austria seized from the Ottoman fleet at Lepanto in 1571 hangs in the monastery's chapel of St Jerome, a gift from Philip II.
- The bronze doors of the main façade, cast by Paolo de Colonia in the late fourteenth century, are among the oldest bronze church doors surviving in Spain.
- The shepherd of the founding legend had no name in the earliest chronicles; a monk only identified him as Gil Cordero in 1743.
- Ferdinand and Isabella received Christopher Columbus at Guadalupe in 1486 and again in 1489, and he returned in 1493 to give thanks for surviving the voyage home.
- On 29 July 1496 Native Americans brought back to Europe were baptised at the monastery.
- Philip II gave the monastery a Renaissance cabinet of cedar and steel inlaid with silver and gold, made in Rome in 1561 and used as the high altar's tabernacle.
- The monumental iron screen closing the sanctuary across all three naves was forged between 1510 and 1514 by two Dominican friars, Francisco de Salamanca and Juan de Ávila.
- To ease the pilgrims' road from the north, Archbishop Pedro Tenorio bridged the Tagus in 1383, and the town of El Puente del Arzobispo grew up around it.
- The Hieronymite priors were also civil lords of the town, and despite centuries of protests and lawsuits the townspeople never won an independent council.
- The terracotta figure of St Jerome on the chapel altarpiece was modelled in the early sixteenth century by the Florentine sculptor Pietro Torrigiano.
Why it is worth it
The late Gothic façade of a great church closes the main square of Guadalupe, a small town at the eastern foot of the Sierra de las Villuercas in Extremadura. For more than four centuries this monastery was one of the richest and most influential religious houses in Spain, a royal sanctuary bound up with the Reconquista, the Catholic Monarchs and the voyages to the New World. UNESCO inscribed it as a World Heritage Site in 1993.
Its origin is a legend. Local tradition holds that in the late thirteenth century a shepherd from Cáceres, Gil Cordero, found a statue of the Virgin on the bank of the Guadalupe River, where Christians were said to have hidden it from the Moors in 714. A chapel went up on the spot. King Alfonso XI, who prayed to the Virgin of Guadalupe before the Battle of Río Salado, credited her with his victory, declared the shrine royal and began a great rebuilding. In 1389 the Hieronymite monks took it over and made it the head house of their order. Henry IV of Castile was buried here in 1474; in 1486 Ferdinand of Aragon issued at Guadalupe the ruling that ended the abusive feudal customs binding Catalan peasants to the land. Christopher Columbus came here on pilgrimage after his first voyage, and the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe carries the shrine's name. The monastery declined after the confiscation of church property in 1835 and was revived by Franciscans in the twentieth century.
The buildings span several centuries. The main church dates from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The Mudéjar cloister of 1389–1405, with round arches set in Moorish-style frames, has at its centre a small tiered pavilion of 1405, and a late Gothic cloister followed in 1531–1533. The baroque sacristy, built in 1638–1647 and richly decorated, is hung with eight large canvases by Francisco de Zurbarán showing monks of the order, painted as lessons in virtue for novices. Behind the church, the octagonal Camarín of 1687–1696, with nine canvases by Luca Giordano, frames the throne of the venerated Virgin. The museums display embroidered vestments made in the monastery's own workshops, giant choir books, and paintings by El Greco and Goya.
Getting there
Guadalupe lies in the province of Cáceres; the nearest larger towns are Trujillo, about 45 km to the west in a straight line, and Navalmoral de la Mata, about 50 km to the north. The nearest airports are Badajoz (BJZ), about 145 km to the southwest, and Salamanca (SLM), about 165 km to the north; Madrid–Barajas (MAD), about 190 km to the northeast, is the main international gateway.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Royal Monastery of Saint Mary of Guadalupe is a Roman Catholic monastic establishment built during the 14th century located in Guadalupe, in Extremadura, Spain. It is located at the foot of the eastern side of the Sierra de las Villuercas and was one of the finest and most important monasteries in the country for more than four centuries. UNESCO declared it a World Heritage Site in 1993.
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