The monastery of San Juan de los Reyes began to be built in 1477 by order of Queen Isabel the Catholic to commemorate her victory at the battle of Toro in 1476. Its monumental presence right in the heart of the Jewish quarter as a royal symbol for the Catholic Monarchs. The Catholic Monarchs were initially the only source of refuge for the Jewish communities before the persecutions which occurred in the late 15th century, yet they were the ones who signed the Decree of expulsion of 1492, thereby putting a permanent end to a long period of cohabitation between Jews, Moslems and Christians. The convent’s austerity contrasts with the grandiosity of the church, adorned by spacious large windows, arches and Gothic pinnacles, on whose walls the chains of the Christian convicts which had hung there since 1494 when the Catholic Monarchs recovered them after the conquest of Granada. The church was built to house the dynastic pantheon of Queen Isabel the Catholic dedicated to St.John the Evangelist. Finally, the monarchs changed their mind after the conquest of Granada, and they are buried in the Royal Chapel of the cathedral of this city. The convent was practically destroyed in the war of Independence and was only partly rebuilt, with the second cloister disappearing according to historicist criteria of the 19th century, leaving no distinction between the old and the restored one, the best example of which is the gargoyles of the cloister.