Salt Lake Temple, house of worship that occupies a central position within Salt Lake City, the capital of Utah, and within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. With its smooth granite exterior and six soaring spires, it sits in Temple Square, a downtown oasis of calm, surrounded by other important Mormon buildings such as the Assembly Hall, a visitor’s centre, and the Tabernacle, as well as the adjacent Joseph Smith Memorial Building and the Conference Center. The Salt Lake Temple is the sixth Mormon temple to be completed and the largest temple in area.
Salt Lake City was founded in 1847 by Brigham Young, second president of the church, who led a group of Mormons into Utah to establish a new colony, and it remains the headquarters of the Mormon church today. The location for the richly symbolic temple was chosen just four days after Young and his party arrived in Salt Lake. Groundbreaking took place in 1853, and the building took more than 40 years to complete, with the 1857–58 conflict between the Mormons and the U.S. government known as the Utah War or Buchanan’s Blunder delaying construction, and the interior finally being completed in just a year. Granite from the local Little Cottonwood Canyon was used in the building work, and the exterior is full of complex symbolism depicting the journey of humankind from life and death to the eternal ever after, as well as various other tenets of the religion. It is topped with a gold-leaf statue of the angel Moroni.
Wilford Woodruff, the church’s fourth president, dedicated the temple on April 6, 1893, and it continues to be the most important Mormon church. The temple is used not for ordinary worship but for special ceremonies and contains a room where the First Presidency and Quorum of Twelve Apostles meet weekly. The temple has never been open for tours, and in 2019 it was closed for several years of extensive renovation.