San Salvador
Metropolitan Cathedral

The Metropolitan Cathedral of the Holy Savior (Catedral Metropolitana de San Salvador) is the principal church of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of San Salvador and the seat of the Archbishop of San Salvador. The church was twice visited by Pope John Paul II, who said that the cathedral was "intimately allied with the joys and hopes of the Salvadoran people." During his visits in 1983 and 1996, the Pope knelt and prayed before the Tomb of Archbishop Óscar Romero, assassinated in 1980, whose tomb here is a major draw for pilgrims. The cathedral's site is the location of the old Temple of Santo Domingo (St. Dominic).

Forty four people died on Palm Sunday, 31 March 1980, during the funeral of Archbishop Romero, as a result of a stampede after some gunmen, allegedly members of security forces (although it has never been corroborated), fired on mourners and on Romero's funeral cortege. The gunmen were never identified. The square in front of the cathedral was the site of celebrations after the signing of the Chapultepec Peace Accords that ended the Salvadoran Civil War in 1992. The cathedral was finished off with a festive tiled ceramic mural façade by the Salvadoran master Fernando Llort and inaugurated on 19 March 1999. In late December 2012, the Archbishop of San Salvador, José Luis Escobar Alas, ordered the removal of the façade without consulting the national government or the artist himself. Workers chipped off and destroyed all the 2,700 tiles of the mural.
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