The cameras of Telemadrid capture an unprecedented solar event that occurs on August 6 in the Monastery of El Escorial, when the sun’s rays are channeled to flood with light the Tabernacle.

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The Basilica of San Lorenzo is the spiritual heart of the Monastery of El Escorial, in Madrid.

It was designed by Juan Bautista de Toledo and completed by Juan de Herrera in the 16th century at the will of Philip II of Spain, symbol of the religious and political power of the monarchy, combining geometric rigor with theological meaning.

The entire Monastery of El Escorial, in fact, is universally recognized as one of the architectural masterpieces of the Spanish Renaissance. Its monumentality has fascinated generations of historians and architects and has been recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1984.

 

The Solar Event of August 6

However, a little-known phenomenon was recently captured inside the Basilica by the cameras of Telemadrid, a Spanish public television channel.

On August 6, the Feast of the Transfiguration of Christ, the sun’s rays enter the church which, with its geometric alignments and astronomical orientations, channels the sunlight toward the Tabernacle, an act of veneration of the Blessed Sacrament.

 

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An Unprecedented Phenomenon?

The phenomenon is the result of a meticulous architectural and astronomical design, worthy of an era in which art, architecture, and faith were closely intertwined.

The television network speaks of a “new solar event” even though it was already known that the orientation of the monastery showed a 12-degree clockwise deviation from due east, allowing the four façades to receive direct sunlight on certain days of the year.

But the specific solar phenomenon captured by the cameras has, in fact, never been shown to the general public, nor highlighted.

 

When Art Transforms Stone Into Liturgy

The solar event of El Escorial shows how sacred architecture was not conceived only for practical or aesthetic purposes, but as a theological and cosmological instrument (and in certain cases, if one thinks of Philip II, also political).

Light, filtered and channeled with precision, still today becomes a tangible sign of the divine presence and transforms stone into liturgy.

Watching the images brings to mind the words of Benedict XVI when he recalled that the vocation of art is to be an “open door towards the infinite, towards a beauty and a truth that go beyond the everyday”, capable of “expressing and making visible the thirst and search for the infinite”.

 

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