Metropolitan Cathedral

Lonely Planet review

San Salvador's Metropolitan Cathedral faces Plaza Barrios and marks the center of the city's street grid. Completed in 1999, after years of renovation, the cathedral stands on the site of an earlier version that burned in 1956. The beige stucco building has two bell towers rising above a blue and yellow checker-patterned dome. The facade is painted with the colorful campesino motifs of La Palma painter Fernando Llort; you can see Llort's schematic paintings at his gallery, El Arbol de Dios.

One level beneath the cavernous nave is the tomb of Archbishop Oscar A Romero, though this is not the church he was assassinated in, as visitors sometimes mistakenly believe (that was the chapel at the Hospital La Divina Provedencia). Romero's tomb is the final receptacle of a steady supply of flowers, political missives and religious pilgrimages. Pope John Paul II knelt here on his visit in March 1993, and was captured in a famous photo.