The Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (IAC, http://www.iac.es/) is promoting the construction of a segmented 10m Telescope to be placed at its Observatorio del Roque de Los Muchachos (ORM) in the island of La Palma, Spain. The Telescope scientific drivers are to achieve an outstanding image quality, to maximize the observing efficiency and to get very high reliability. These demands very tight technical requirements, including the active control of the primary and secondary mirrors, the simultaneous availability of several instruments on standby so that queue scheduling can be implemented, and an object oriented based control system integrating every subsystem of the GTC. The talk will review the present status of the GTC project, which will see first light in 2002. We will also present an overview of the monitoring campaign which has been undertaken to select the Telescope site at the ORM. Finally, the latest status of the project regarding technical and budgetary matters will be presented. Several countries have expressed interest in becoming partners of the GTC. Spain is interested in bringing into the project suitable partners with the aim of building a truly advanced telescope for the next Century.