The monastery is an out­stand­ing repos­i­to­ry of four cen­turies of Span­ish reli­gious archi­tec­ture. It sym­bol­izes two sig­nif­i­cant events in world his­to­ry that occurred in 1492: the Recon­quest of the Iber­ian penin­su­la by the Catholic Kings and Christo­pher Colum­bus‘ arrival in the Amer­i­c­as. Its famous stat­ue of the Vir­gin became a pow­er­ful sym­bol of the Chris­tian­iza­tion of much of the New World.