The Society of Jesus arrived in Seville in 1554 and constructed a church, a professed house and a novitiate. At the beginning of the 17th century, Lucia de Medina donated land for a new, larger building and a new church with the conditions that she would be buried in the chapel and that the church be dedicated to her patron saint, Saint Louis (Louis IX of France, medieval king and first brother of King Ferdinand III of Castile and León, who reconquered Seville.)
Construction of the church began in 1699 and ended in 1730. The Jesuits abandoned the church in 1767 as a result of the Royal Order of Carlos III that expelled the Jesuits from Spain. Although they returned in 1817, the expulsion of 1835 forced them to abandon the complex altogether.
Unlike many other churches in Seville, Saint Louis was saved from destruction by the fires of 1936. Because of this, and its period of disuse, many parts of the original design have been preserved.
References:The Pilgrimage Church of Wies (Wieskirche) is an oval rococo church, designed in the late 1740s by Dominikus Zimmermann. It is located in the foothills of the Alps in the municipality of Steingaden.
The sanctuary of Wies is a pilgrimage church extraordinarily well-preserved in the beautiful setting of an Alpine valley, and is a perfect masterpiece of Rococo art and creative genius, as well as an exceptional testimony to a civilization that has disappeared.
The hamlet of Wies, in 1738, is said to have been the setting of a miracle in which tears were seen on a simple wooden figure of Christ mounted on a column that was no longer venerated by the Premonstratensian monks of the Abbey. A wooden chapel constructed in the fields housed the miraculous statue for some time. However, pilgrims from Germany, Austria, Bohemia, and even Italy became so numerous that the Abbot of the Premonstratensians of Steingaden decided to construct a splendid sanctuary.