The First Presidency announced this week open house and dedication dates early in 1999 for two temples, the Colonia Juarez Mexico Temple and the Madrid Spain Temple.
Open house of the Colonia Juarez Mexico Temple will be Feb. 26-27.
Dedication of the temple — the second to be in operation in Mexico — will be March 6-7 in four sessions. A cornerstone-laying ceremony will be held on Saturday, March 6, along with the first dedicatory session. Three additional dedicatory sessions will be held on Sunday, March 7.
During a visit to Colonia Juarez at the commemoration of the centennial of the Juarez Academy in June 1997, President Gordon B. Hinckley commented about the possibility of a temple there.
"I would like to see the time come when all of our people throughout the world could get to a temple without too much inconvenience," he said on that occasion. "I think you are about as far away as anybody."
In the priesthood session of general conference on Oct. 4, 1997, President Hinckley told of plans to build smaller temples in remote areas of the Church that have a small LDS population and announced the first three such temples. One of the three would be "in the LDS colonies in northern Mexico."
Ground for the Colonia Juarez Mexico Temple was broken on March 7, 1998.
The temple, measuring 76 feet by 102 feet, sits on a hilltop overlooking Juarez Academy, an LDS preparatory school. Its total floor area is 10,700 feet.
The Madrid Spain Temple will be dedicated March 20-22, with the open house scheduled from Feb. 20 to March 13.
Announcement that the Church was in the process of acquiring property for the construction of a temple in Spain was made at general conference on April 4, 1993.
While serving as a counselor in the First Presidency, President Hinckley went to Spain in 1992 to select a temple site. On June 11, 1996, as the first president of the Church to visit Spain, he broke ground for the temple.
At the groundbreaking ceremony, he said, ". . . What is built here will be beautiful. We will build a temple, a stake center, and missionary training center, and some other facilities to accommodate the needs of our people. The structure will be beautiful and the ground will be beautiful. This will be a hallowed and sacred place."
The temple is located in Mortalez, an area in the western part of Madrid. The elevated site is near dozens of brick high-rise apartments.
The Madrid temple is one of the larger temples currently being constructed, with 45,000 square feet of total floor area, and measuring 116 feet by 138 feet.
