The Holy Priory Church Basilica Cathedral of the Military Orders of Our Lady Santa María del Prado in Ciudad Real, begun in the 15th century, is in the Gothic style, although it has previous elements of the late Romanesque style belonging to the precedent of the cathedral: the parish church period of Alfonso X the Wise. On this the cathedral was built, which was completed in the middle of the 16th century after the construction of the vault covers. However, we also find later elements, in the Renaissance and Baroque style. The last thing that was built was the current tower, at the beginning of the 19th century.

Currently, it is considered as BIC (Asset of Cultural Interest) (it was declared a Historic-Artistic Monument belonging to the National Artistic Treasure by decree of June 3, 19311).

According to tradition, on May 25, 1088, the image of the Virgen del Prado, Romanesque carving, arrived as part of the royal procession of Alfonso VI, which stopped in a small town in La Mancha called Pozuelo Seco de Don Gil. The locals, after the supposed appearance of the Virgin, asked their king to give them the image to be venerated there. This nucleus, which four centuries later would be called Ciudad Real, it is deduced that it would have at least one small hermitage of little importance. When in the year 1195 the Castilian King Alfonso VIII lost the battle of Alarcos to the Almohads, a very short distance from Ciudad Real, it is believed that he had a new church built in the place where that small hermitage was, although it is also possible that both were the same and therefore only one.

However, the precedent to the cathedral that is actually documented is the church of Santa María, which was ordered to be built by King Alfonso X el Sabio in 1255, when he granted the title of town to the nucleus of Pozuelo Seco de Don Gil with the intention of promoting the lands of La Mancha as an alternative to the already abandoned Alarcos, within the framework of the process of Reconquest and Repopulation of the Iberian Peninsula by the Castilian Monarchy. It was from the granting of this title, when a building policy began in the city, in which the church of Santa María was part, along with other works such as the construction of the wall and the Puerta de Toledo.

In 1931 it was declared a Historic-Artistic Monument. During the Spanish Civil War, the Cathedral was used as a garage by the republican side, and a good part of the ecclesiastical heritage of the Cathedral was stolen and destroyed, such as the master chair of the Order of Santiago, which was destroyed in 1936 by the Torres Militia. de Valdepeñas or the Portapaz de Uclés, which was stolen by two individuals from Miguelturra in August of the same year. The Romanesque carving of the Virgen del Prado, probably from the 10th century, also disappeared.

In 1967 it also became a Basilica. In 1980 the Cathedral became the seat of the new diocese of Ciudad Real.

On the outside of the temple there is an 18th century sundial, a child carved out of stone in one of the two corners of the façade and a head carved out of stone in the other.

In 1985, during some works on the altar, several skulls appeared, one of them with an arrow stuck in it.

Inside it has two processional steps that go out at Holy Week in Ciudad Real with their respective brotherhoods: the Penitential Brotherhood of the Santísimo Cristo de la Piedad and the Brotherhood of Ave María, both carvings by the Sevillian imaginer Antonio Castillo Lastrucci.