The massive building of the Shrine of Loyola spreads on both sides and at the back of the great circular Basilica that has been built by Tower-House. The relic that is the “Santa Casa” is thus sheltered and enveloped by a huge marble reliquary.

This building, initially founded as a College, has successively served as residence of Jesuit priests, retreat house, seminary for non-Jesuit students, high school. Novitiate and center of humanistic studies of the Society of Jesus. Nowadays, since no teaching is done in the building, it is not called College but Shrine. The community living in it is engaged mostly in pastoral work in the Basilica of Loyola and the adjoining Spirituality Center.

The imposing central building of the Shrine of Loyola, designed by Carlo Fontana and started in the 17th century, is a splendid example of baroque architecture. On a plinth of stone, inevitable to cover the little hillock on which the Tower-House of Loyola was sitting, there rise three floors of wisely diminishing heights.

The aesthetic effect of the whole does not depend on the combination of friezes, pediments or capitals, but on the balance of the size of its wings and its attics, the right distribution of their windows, the quality and hue of the marbles. And that, too, is baroque of the highest quality.

From whichever angle one looks at it, even from the air, the old College knows perfectly well where to be, imposing itself on the landscape without disturbing it: a piece of the Izarrraitz mountain from whose stones it was born and which has descended to the valley to dominate it.

In the interior, all the corridors and rooms of the ground and first floors are covered by groin vaults (simple in the corridors and multiple in ,any of the rooms). The vaults of the corridors lean on arches of chiseled marble, supported by corbels and pilasters placed against the wall. The pavements of the southern wing (the first that was completed before the suppression of the Society) are of flagstones on the ground floor and of thick chestnut planks on the first floor.

For anyone with a sense of history, roaming about the corridors of Loyola (especially those of the southern wing) affords a voyage back in history to the Golden Age of the old Society of Jesus, the one before its suppression.

We shall now study four of the most suggestive parts of the building: the two imperial staircases, the anti-refectory, and the refectory.