SYDNEY - THE Catholic Church will hold its next World Youth Day in the Spanish capital Madrid in 2011, Pope Benedict XVI said on Sunday as he closed the festival in Sydney at a giant open-air mass.

'World Youth Day 2011 will take place in Madrid, Spain,' the pope told hundreds of thousands of worshippers gathered at Sydney's Randwick racecourse for the celebration of Catholic youth.

'Until then, let us continue to pray for one another and let us joyfully bear witness to Christ before the world,' he said.

The announcement sparked jubilation among the estimated 5,000 Spanish pilgrims who travelled to Australia for the event.

Church sources told AFP that Madrid was Pope Benedict's personal choice as the next World Youth Day host. It marks a return to the Catholic Church's heartland after the event in Sydney, a largely secular city.

It will be the second time Spain has hosted the largest Christian gathering on earth after it staged the event in 1989 in the city of Santiago de Compostela. The event was last held in the German city of Cologne in 2005.