The altar

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The Metropolitan Cathedral of the Holy Savior (Spanish: Catedral Metropolitana de San Salvador)

"The first cathedral was established in 1842 and destroyed in an 1873 earthquake.

The second wooden cathedral, completed in 1888, served as the seat of San Salvador's archbishops. On August 8, 1951, the Old San Salvador Cathedral was consumed by fire as a distraught crowd of onlookers watched.[1]

For the next forty years, the San Salvador Cathedral was a barren concrete structure of exposed bricks and jutting iron buttresses. During the late 1970s, Archbishop Óscar Romero famously deferred completion of the Cathedral in order to fund projects for the poor. The site was also the stage of several national sagas, including the grand funerals of assassinated political figures, and Romero's fiery Sunday Masses. On May 9, 1979, 24 demonstrators were gunned down by supposedly security forces on the front steps of the cathedral during the San Salvador Cathedral Massacre.[2]

An even greater toll was exacted on Palm Sunday, March 30, 1980, during the funeral of Óscar Romero (who was assassinated Monday, March 24, 1980). At his funeral, 44 people were killed during a stampede after some elements, allegedly members of security forces (although it has never been corroborated) fired on mourners/worshippers and on Romero's funeral cortege. The gunmen were never officially identified. Later, the square in front of the cathedral was the site of rapturous celebrations after the signing of the Chapultepec Peace Accords that ended the Salvadoran Civil War in 1992. The cathedral was completed and inaugurated on March 19, 1999, and finished off with a festive tiled facade by the Salvadoran master Fernando Llort."

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Cathedral_of_San_Salvador

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