The Basilica of the Annunciation stands over a place long identified in Catholic tradition with Mary's home and the angel Gabriel's announcement that she would bear Jesus. The focal point is a rock-cut grotto incorporated into the lower church. Archaeology around it has revealed domestic and agricultural remains from ancient Nazareth as well as layers of Christian worship. Early pilgrims associated the location with the Annunciation, and by the Byzantine period a church had been constructed to formalize a local tradition that had probably developed around an earlier shrine.

That Byzantine sanctuary was damaged and eventually ruined during the upheavals that followed changing control of the region. After Crusaders captured the area, Tancred established Latin rule in Galilee and a large Romanesque church rose over the grotto in the early twelfth century. The building was still being embellished in the 1170s. Sculpted capitals depicting apostles were prepared but apparently never installed before Saladin's victory at Hattin in 1187 transformed the political situation. Christian worship continued for a time, but Mamluk forces under Sultan Baybars destroyed the Crusader church during their campaign through Galilee in 1263.

For centuries pilgrims visited amid ruins and shifting restrictions. Franciscans, who had become custodians of Catholic holy places, secured a foothold in Nazareth in the seventeenth century. They built a church over the grotto in 1730, one of the few periods in which Ottoman authorities permitted a substantial Latin sanctuary there. The building was enlarged in 1877 as pilgrimage increased. Schools, hospices, and religious communities around it helped turn modern Nazareth into a major Christian destination shared, and sometimes disputed, among different traditions.

The eighteenth-century church was demolished in 1954 to permit archaeological investigation and construction of a much larger basilica. Excavations exposed foundations, mosaics, and architectural fragments from earlier phases. Italian architect Giovanni Muzio designed a two-level structure that left the grotto visible below while creating an upper church for large congregations. Pope Paul VI visited the unfinished sanctuary and celebrated Mass during his historic 1964 pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The completed basilica was dedicated in 1969, with artwork contributed by Catholic communities from many nations.

Later papal visits reinforced the building's international role. John Paul II celebrated Mass there on the Feast of the Annunciation in 2000, and Benedict XVI visited in 2009. The basilica continues to serve the local Latin parish under Franciscan care while receiving pilgrims from around the world. Its history is a sequence of devotion, destruction, rebuilding, and reinterpretation: Byzantine and Crusader foundations, an Ottoman-era Franciscan church, and a modern concrete sanctuary all surround the grotto. Rather than preserving one untouched moment, the site documents how successive Christian communities have claimed, protected, and monumentalized the memory of the Annunciation across more than fifteen centuries. The international artworks installed around the upper church express the universal ambitions of the modern basilica, but the lower grotto remains intentionally restrained. That contrast directs attention from twentieth-century nation-to-nation Catholic display toward the excavated center of devotion. It also makes the building a record of modern archaeology's influence on church design, since the new sanctuary was planned around the decision to expose and protect earlier remains.