Monasterio de Santa María de la Caridad: A Cistercian Nunnery in Tulebras
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.6
- Popularity
- Low
- Country
- Spain
- Primary era
- Medieval
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Medieval, Early Modern
- Civilizations
- Kingdom of Navarre, Spanish
- Site type
- Religious
- Remains
- Monastery
On this page14 sections
History
Monasterio de Santa María de la Caridad is a Cistercian monastery in Tulebras, Spain, founded in 1147 for nuns from Fabas Abbey, also known as Lumen Dei, in the Diocese of Comminges in southern France. It is Spain’s first female Cistercian monastery and became the mother house of several Cistercian communities on the Iberian Peninsula.
Foundation and relocation
The foundation took place at Tudela under the patronage of García Ramírez of Navarre. The community initially lived in Tudela or its immediate surroundings. During the reign of Sancho VI the Wise, it moved between 1156 and 1157 to the present site, about 11 kilometres south of Tudela, and construction of the monastery began around 1157.
The new monastery occupied a fertile area beside the Queiles River, near the borders of Aragon and Castile. Religious life has continued without interruption since the original foundation in 1147, and at the present location since 1157.
Mother house of Iberian communities
Santa María de la Caridad established a network of daughter houses during the twelfth century. Its documented foundations were Perales in 1160, Gradefes in 1169, Cañas in 1170, Vallbona de las Monjas in 1173, Trasobares in 1182, and Las Huelgas in 1187.
Las Huelgas later became the head of the female Cistercian monasteries in Castile through the initiative of Alfonso VIII of Castile. It took control of Perales, Gradefes, and Cañas from Tulebras, changing the balance of authority among the Cistercian communities.
War, decline, and renewal
In 1378, Castilian troops destroyed the settlement that had developed around the monastery. By the middle of the fifteenth century, the buildings were in a ruined condition, although the nuns continued to live there. Local secular nobles controlled the appointment of abbesses until ordinary ecclesiastical administration was restored in the mid-sixteenth century.
During the early modern period, new monastic buildings were added and artistic commissions were undertaken. The monastery did not recover the material prosperity it had possessed in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, but it retained considerable spiritual and intellectual importance. It survived the Mendizábal confiscation of 1835, a Spanish process that dissolved or dispossessed many religious institutions and transferred their property to the state or private owners. The monastery’s archive was transferred to the General Archive of Navarre.
Trappist continuity and modern preservation
In 1957 the community joined the Cistercian Order of the Strict Observance, commonly known as the Trappists. This branch of the Cistercian order follows especially rigorous monastic practice. Tulebras remains a Trappist nunnery affiliated with the Cistercian lineage of Cîteaux.
In 1990, a group of nuns left Tulebras at the request of the bishop of the Diocese of Esmeraldas in Ecuador. They founded the Monastery of Santa María de la Esperanza there in 1991. The nuns later undertook a major restoration of the monastic buildings and outer court themselves. With assistance from the Government of Navarre, a museum was established to make the monastery’s collection of sacred art accessible. The monastery has been protected as a historic-artistic monument since its declaration of 21 November 1994.
Remains
The surviving complex combines Romanesque-Cistercian, Renaissance, and later Baroque buildings made or altered between the twelfth and eighteenth centuries. Its principal elements include the church, cloister, abbatial palace, former dormitory, and museum rooms, which together preserve successive phases of monastic construction and use.
Church
The church is the oldest principal part of the complex. It was built at the end of the twelfth century and later remodelled. The small building has a single nave with a noticeably misaligned axis, an exterior wall of double elevation, and a semicircular apse. On the north, or Gospel-side, wall, a Romanesque portal has three semicircular archivolts, the decorated bands that follow the curves of an arch. The outer archivolt carries carved floral ornament and rests on attached columns whose capitals have geometrized plant forms. Pairs of similar columns support the inner entrance arch. The portal has undergone extensive restoration.
Five bays divide the nave. Pilasters with attached, suspended half-columns mark the bays, while only those belonging to the triumphal arch before the apse reach their full development. Their capitals are plain or carry schematic palmettes and leaves. The original roof probably consisted of a pointed barrel vault supported by strong rectangular transverse arches resting on the half-columns. After that roof collapsed, a ribbed Renaissance vault with late Gothic survivals was installed in the sixteenth century. Its decorated bosses bear the arms of Hernando de Aragón y de Gurrea, a Cistercian archbishop of Zaragoza from 1539 to 1575 and Viceroy of Aragon from 1566 to 1575. The lighter stone of the replacement vault contrasts with the Romanesque-Cistercian walls.
The presbytery contains a thirteenth-century altar formed from a single stone slab supported by five small columns with vegetal bases and capitals. It also houses a fourteenth-century Gothic image of the Virgin of Charity.
Monastic buildings
Cloister
The complex was probably first built as a single-storey Romanesque monastery. Two arches revealed in the east wall of the cloister, or chapter-house wing, represent this early arrangement. The cloister galleries were continued in the sixteenth century in brick and covered with ribbed cross-vaults, which are vaults supported by intersecting structural ribs. They are now coated in white plaster. During the latest restoration, the external arches were uncovered and opened, revealing rhythms inspired by Mudéjar architecture, a Christian tradition in Iberia that incorporated forms and techniques associated with Muslim artistic practice.
Abbatial palace
The eighteenth-century abbatial palace is a Baroque building with a brick facade. It retains a balcony constructed during the sixteenth-century reform, from which the abbess issued proclamations and public notices to her feudal dependants. An alabaster coat of arms is set above the main door.
Museum and artistic collection
Former dormitory
The museum occupies three rooms, including the former twelfth-century monastic dormitory. That room continued to serve as a dormitory until the seventeenth century. It now contains three seventeenth-century Baroque altarpieces. The Saint Bernard Altarpiece has a central canvas depicting the Apparition of the Virgin to Saint Bernard, while an inscription on its crowning cornice states that Catalina Royo, a nun of the monastery, commissioned it in 1649.
Altarpieces and paintings
The Oñate family donated the Altarpiece of Our Lady of the Rosary. Its predella, the lower painted section of an altarpiece, shows Saint Anne, Saint Dominic, and Saint Paul. The central canvas represents the Virgin of the Rosary, and the upper section contains a painting of God the Father.
A major Mannerist Renaissance altarpiece, made around 1570 and attributed to Jerónimo Cósida, stood in the church’s main chapel from the sixteenth-century reform until its removal for restoration in 1970. It is now in the museum. Its predella depicts Saint John the Baptist and Saint John the Evangelist. The main section shows the Transit of the Virgin surrounded by apostles, with Saint Mary Magdalene and Saint Nicholas of Bari at the sides, while the upper section represents the Crucifixion.
Another work associated with Cósida, possibly from the Altarpiece of the Dormition, represents the Trinity as a seated three-faced figure using the traditional physiognomy of Christ. The figure holds a triangular diagram explaining that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are distinct yet together constitute one God. The panel was probably removed from public view in 1628 after Pope Urban VIII prohibited this form of Trinity imagery as heretical.
The collection also includes an eighteenth-century altarpiece commissioned by Francisca de Argayz y Ribera. Its large central canvas is flanked by paintings of martyrs, popes, bishops, and evangelists.
Liturgical objects and archaeological remains
The museum’s metalwork includes several gilded-silver chalices, among them a Purist example from the first half of the seventeenth century, six reliquaries, and a late-eighteenth-century Rococo oval tray. Other objects include two lamps dated 1613, five fountains or fruit dishes from Tudela dating to the second half of the eighteenth century, and a late-sixteenth-century gilded-silver tray in the late Renaissance style.
Further liturgical pieces comprise a small silver holy-water vessel from around 1600, a silver censer remodelled in different periods and styles, three partly gilded Rococo silver objects from the second half of the eighteenth century, a boat-shaped incense vessel, two candlesticks, and a pointer. A monumental Baroque Eucharistic casket made of silver at Alfaro in La Rioja in 1684 is displayed with an eighteenth-century Baroque chalice and gilded-silver monstrance. Two pastoral staffs include a soberly decorated Purist silver example from the beginning of the seventeenth century, and the collection also contains a large late Renaissance processional cross.
A dressed and articulated image of the Virgin of the Bed, probably made at the beginning of the seventeenth century, rests inside a polychromed urn dated 1784 with six wooden candlesticks. The same display includes small sculptures of the Assumption and the Immaculate Conception.
Several austere Romanesque capitals reflect Cistercian artistic principles. Four discoid funerary stelae are also displayed. One is pre-Romanesque and dates approximately to the tenth or eleventh century, while the other three are medieval. Their restrained decoration includes Maltese crosses and floral petals made through low relief, bevelled carving, and incision.
