Short answers, pulled from the story.
El Escorial is a royal monastery, palace, basilica, pantheon, library, museum, school, and hospital located about 45 kilometres northwest of Madrid. King Philip II ordered its construction to commemorate the 1557 Spanish victory at the Battle of St. Quentin and to serve as a necropolis for the Spanish royal family, a Counter-Reformation center of learning, and a statement of Spain's role as the center of the Christian world.
El Escorial was designed by Juan Bautista de Toledo, appointed architect-royal by Philip II in 1559, with construction beginning on the 23rd of April 1563. Toledo died in 1567, and his apprentice Juan de Herrera completed the complex in 1584, just under 21 years after the cornerstone was laid. The project became so famously drawn-out that the Spanish expression "la obra de El Escorial" entered the language as a proverb for anything that takes a very long time.
The traditional explanation is that the grid shape honors Saint Lawrence, who was martyred by being roasted on a grill in the third century; his feast day, the 10th of August, coincides with the 1557 Battle of St. Quentin. The most persuasive scholarly theory, however, traces the layout to Flavius Josephus's descriptions of the Temple of Solomon, a reading supported by the statues of David and Solomon flanking the basilica entrance and a Solomon fresco at the center of the library.
A fire in 1671 destroyed approximately 5,280 handwritten codices. The printed collections in the main hall were saved, but the losses included the Concilios visigóticos and Francisco Hernández de Toledo's 19-volume Natural History of the Indies. The priest Antonio de San José spent more than 25 years reclassifying and cataloguing survivors, eventually counting 45,000 volumes remaining.
The Royal Pantheon contains the tombs of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (as King Charles I of Spain), Philip II, Philip III, Philip IV, Charles II, Louis I, Charles III, Charles IV, Ferdinand VII, Isabella II, Alfonso XII, and Alfonso XIII, whose remains were transferred from Rome in 1980. Philip V, Ferdinand VI, and Amadeus of Savoy are not interred there.
El Escorial receives more than 500,000 visitors annually, most of them day-trippers from Madrid. UNESCO declared the site a World Heritage Site on the 2nd of November 1984. A major reorganisation of the visitor experience funded by 6.5 million euros from the European Union began in 2024.