El Escorial is a monastery/palace/basilica all constructed under the watchful eye of king Phillip II. In 1584 Escorial was completed taking only 21 years. Which is amazing for the size of this place. It has a huge art gallery to house all of the art Phillip II collected during his reign. It is sometimes called the mini-Prado. His empire was so large that he controlled Netherlands, Portugual, Naples, Sicely, and the Americas. As a result, he has Flemish, Italian, and Spanish art. It was incredible. All the art is showcased in just one little corner of Escorial. In the middle is the Basilica, which itself is rather large. Phillip was highly religious, and was always found doing what God wanted him to do. His devotion to the Catholic church and to God is apparent in Escorial. He had is bedroom built right above and to the side of the basilica, so when he was too sick or too frail to leave his bed, he could still participate in Mass every day. His palace was far from decorative and elaborate. His bedroom was very plain, and was just enough to fit his needs. I asked myself, if he was such a religious man, why did he build this huge palace for himself. But I learned as I saw it that it wasn't built just to glorify the state or himself. Phillip was a king that loved knowledge and reading. This was apparent in his amazing library with 40,000 books! The library was my favorite room. All the books were spine in, which was interesting. They had some of them pulled out and we could see that Phillip had annotated them. I also loved that he had the model of Ptolemy's Universe. It was the original. We weren't supposed to take pictures, but I did. I thought it was cool, it had the earth in the middle with all the sphere's surrounding it. El Escorial is still used today as monestary, so we couldn't see all of it. It was very impressive, though. It was awesome to be able to know so much about Phillip II because we read a book on him. It explained a lot about the place, and why some things were the way they were.