Royal Monastery of Santa María de Guadalupe

The Royal Monastery of Santa María de Guadalupe rises above a small town in the hills of Cáceres, Extremadura, an outstanding repository of four centuries of Spanish religious architecture in which Gothic, Mudéjar, Renaissance and Baroque work gather around a sequence of cloisters. Long tied to the Spanish crown, it symbolises two events of world significance that fell in 1492: the completion of the Reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula by the Catholic Monarchs, and Christopher Columbus's first voyage to the Americas, whose crews were later blessed here. Its revered statue of the dark Virgin of Guadalupe became a powerful emblem carried across the New World, giving her name to shrines and places throughout the Americas. Richly decorated with paintings, illuminated choir books and treasures accumulated over centuries, the monastery remains a major place of pilgrimage. It was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1993.