San Jerónimo el Real & the Moneo Cloister
Why is it significant?
Climb the steps and look up at the church with the two slender pointed towers, a little Gothic fairy tale on top of a Madrid hill. This is San Jerónimo el Real, and for centuries it was the most royal church in the city.
Key Facts
| Place | San Jerónimo el Real & the Moneo Cloister |
|---|---|
| Address | Calle de Moreto 4, 28014 Madrid, Spain |
| Geo Coordinates | 40.41450, -3.69100 |
| Part of Walk | Madrid's Landscape of Light: The Paseo del Arte, the Prado & the Retiro |
| Generated | Generated |
Climb the steps and look up at the church with the two slender pointed towers, a little Gothic fairy tale on top of a Madrid hill. This is San Jerónimo el Real, and for centuries it was the most royal church in the city.
A Hieronymite monastery was moved to this hillside at the beginning of the sixteenth century, then far outside the town. The kings liked it so much that they built themselves rooms beside it for retreats, and Philip the Fourth's favourite, the Count-Duke of Olivares, turned those rooms into a whole pleasure palace in the 1630s: the Buen Retiro, the good retreat. That palace has almost vanished, but its park became the Retiro you will reach later on this walk.
In this church the heirs to the throne swore their oaths as Princes of Asturias for about three centuries. In 1906 King Alfonso the Thirteenth married Victoria Eugenie here, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria. On the way back to the palace, an anarchist threw a bomb hidden in a bouquet at the royal carriage on Calle Mayor. The couple survived; more than twenty soldiers and onlookers did not. And in November 1975, days after Franco's death, a Mass here marked the start of Juan Carlos the First's reign.
Now turn to the brick cube beside the church. That is the Prado's extension by Rafael Moneo, opened in 2007, and its bronze doors are by the artist Cristina Iglesias, cast like a thicket of tangled branches. The museum needed space on the site of the monastery's ruined seventeenth-century cloister. So the cloister was dismantled stone by stone, restored, and rebuilt inside the new building, where it now sits like a jewel in a box.
From here, walk back down to the Paseo del Prado and turn right, towards the busy roundabout with a sea god standing in a shell chariot. Two worlds meet there: a football tradition, and a billionaire's paintings.