Monastery of Santa Maria de Vallbona: A Cistercian Nunnery in Spain
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- Country
- Spain
- Primary era
- Medieval
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Medieval, Modern
- Civilizations
- Crown of Aragon, Spanish
- Site type
- Religious
- Remains
- Monastery
On this page15 sections
History
The Monastery of Santa Maria de Vallbona in Spain is a female Cistercian abbey whose buildings developed from the mid-twelfth to fourteenth centuries in a transitional Romanesque-Gothic style. It began as a mixed community of hermits or anchorites founded by Ramon de Vallbona, a Catalan nobleman, and is known from 1157. The community followed the Rule of Saint Benedict, the monastic rule governing communal religious life, discipline, and work.
From hermitage to Cistercian abbey
Count Ramon Berenguer IV of Barcelona granted land to the community in 1163. By 1175, only the female community remained, and the nuns joined the Cistercian Order. This reform movement within Western monasticism emphasized enclosure, communal discipline, manual work, and architectural simplicity. Vallbona consequently became the first Cistercian nunnery on the Iberian Peninsula.
Oria Ramirez, who had previously belonged to Tulebras Abbey in Navarre, became the first abbess in 1176. Vallbona was a female Cistercian abbey under the authority of Fontfroide, its mother abbey. The community attracted women from the Catalan nobility and received privileges from King Alfonso II of Aragon and Queen Sancha of Castile. King James I of Aragon stayed at Vallbona repeatedly and supported its construction.
Pope Innocent III granted the abbey immunity and protection for its property in 1198 and 1200. A papal bull issued in 1201 regulated enclosure and secured Vallbona’s independence from the episcopate. These privileges strengthened the institution’s position as a religious community governed within the Cistercian framework rather than by the local bishop.
Land, jurisdiction, and political power
Donations and wills, including a bequest from Count Ermengol VII, allowed the monastery to assemble a substantial landed lordship between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, particularly in the County of Urgell. Under Abbess Saurena de Anglesola, who governed from 1379 to 1392, the abbey bought civil and criminal jurisdiction over its possessions from King Peter III of Aragon for 22,000 Barcelona sous. This purchase established the Barony of Vallbona and made the monastery the political and legal centre of its towns and districts.
At the height of its power, the community included about 150 nuns. Many came from prominent Catalan families, including the Cardona, Cervera, Queralt, Boixadors, and Anglesola lineages. Vallbona’s influence rested on both its religious standing and its control of land, settlements, and legal authority.
War, reform, and the creation of Vallbona de les Monges
The Catalan Civil War of 1462-1472 affected the abbey, as did the Council of Trent, the sixteenth-century Roman Catholic council that addressed church doctrine and discipline. One Tridentine measure prohibited female religious communities from remaining in unpopulated places. In response, the nuns ceded part of their land in 1573 to settlers, chiefly from Montesquiu. Their settlement became Vallbona de les Monges.
The new settlement used the monastery’s external buildings, while the church, cloister, and strictly conventual premises remained with the nuns. The abbey later experienced disputes with the Cistercian Order, especially with Poblet, as well as financial difficulties and conflicts with towns belonging to its barony. The Reapers’ War, the War of the Spanish Succession, and the Roussillon War added further disruption to the monastery’s history.
Continuity and modern preservation
The nineteenth-century Mendizábal ecclesiastical confiscations, measures that expropriated and sold church property in Spain, led to the nuns’ exclaustration, or enforced departure from their monastery, for six months. They continued their monastic life outside the complex, and Vallbona suffered less damage than Poblet and Santes Creus. A Cistercian community has occupied the monastery continuously except during the Spanish Civil War.
Vallbona’s library and scriptorium, the monastery’s writing and copying room, became renowned. Former nuns copied and illustrated fourteen thirteenth-century codices, which remain preserved with historically important documents in the abbey archive. The monastery also operated a pharmacy that supplied the villages of the barony, a role reflected in fifteenth-century records.
The monastery was declared a National Monument on 3 June 1931. It is also listed as a Property of Cultural Interest and a Cultural Asset of National Interest in Catalonia. Together with Poblet and Santes Creus, it forms part of the Cistercian Route. In 1986, the Department of Culture of the Generalitat of Catalonia commissioned Llorens i Perelló to restore the complex and build a separate structure for the nuns’ cells and work rooms. The works resumed in 1997, renewing parts of the monastery while providing accommodation and facilities for ceramic work, word processing, and computer-based musical scores.
Remains
The surviving monastery is organized around a church and an irregular cloister, with the church retaining a Latin-cross plan and a mixture of rounded Romanesque forms and pointed Gothic construction. The church, cloister, chapter house, chapels, tombs, portals, sculptures, and later monastic facilities preserve successive stages of building from the twelfth through the nineteenth centuries, together with modern alterations to the complex.
The church
Plan, vaults, and tower
The church was built between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries. Its single nave is divided into four bays, while the transept is longer and narrower than the nave. At the crossing, an octagonal dome rests on squinches, architectural elements that convert a square space into a base for a dome; the squinches date from the thirteenth century. The two transept arms end in square apsidal chapels, and the principal eastern apse is plain and quadrangular.
An ogival cross vault covers the nave, while barrel vaults cover the apses and crossing. A grille separates the nave from the transept and the eastern end of the church. Above the second nave bay rises an unusual octagonal Gothic bell tower, built between 1340 and 1348 under Abbess Elisenda de Copons. It rests directly on the lateral walls and functions architecturally like a second dome over a crossing.
Royal and noble tombs
The presbytery, the part of the church surrounding the high altar, contains the tomb of Violant of Hungary, wife of James I of Aragon. She died in 1251 at the monastery of Salas de Huesca, and her remains were transferred to Vallbona in 1275. The year of transfer appears in the inscription on her sarcophagus. The church also contains the tomb of Sancha of Aragon, the daughter of Violant and James I, who became a nun and died in the Holy Land. Her sarcophagus rests on three inverted columns described as arranged “for the funeral” as a sign of mourning.
In the southern apsidal chapel stands the tomb of Ferrer Alamany de Toralla, who died in 1360, and his wife Beatriz de Guimerà. Ferrer appears on the lid dressed as a knight, with heraldry on his coat. Beatriz is shown on the side wearing the Cistercian habit, while two angels on the rear wall carry the souls of the dead toward heaven.
Chapels, portals, and wall tombs
The Corpus Christi Chapel, to the right of the choir, contains a polychrome stone image of the Virgin Mary attributed to Guillem Seguer. Two fourteenth-century antependia, decorated panels or hangings placed before an altar, from the chapel are preserved in the National Art Museum of Catalonia. A chapel constructed in 1895 in the eastern cloister wing contains the Virgin of the Cloister, a thirteenth-century Romanesque stone sculpture. The monastery also represents the fourteenth-century Gothic Madonna called El Cor by a replica; the original is preserved in the parish church of Sant Llorenc de Rocallaura.
The principal portal occupies the northern arm of the transept and faces the main square. Its splayed semicircular arch has five archivolts, decorated bands following the curve of an arch, supported by columns with capitals carved with leaves. The tympanum shows the Virgin and Child surrounded by angels, and the cornice above carries a frieze of blind arcades with carved corbels.
A second doorway in the north wall, opening toward the third nave bay, is blocked by a sarcophagus set inside an ogival arcosolium, an arched recess containing a tomb. A Trinitarian chrismon, a Christian monogram referring to the Trinity, is carved above it. Five sarcophagi line the wall, including four Romanesque examples from the thirteenth century and one Gothic example. Heraldic symbols appear on all of them; two identify Sibil-la de Guimerà, wife of Guerau Alamany, and Miquela Sasala, whose tomb is dated 1244.
The cloister and conventual rooms
South and east galleries
The cloister is an irregular quadrilateral with unequal sides, built in successive phases from the twelfth to the fifteenth century. Its covered galleries have cross vaults, and a doorway halfway along the nave provides access from the church at the eastern gallery. The south wing is the oldest, dating from the twelfth century. It follows austere Cistercian Romanesque forms, with three bays divided by three piers and three semicircular arcades carried on paired columns with completely plain capitals.
The east wing dates from the first half of the thirteenth century. Four piers divide its five bays, whose pointed relieving arches frame groups of three semicircular arcades. Eight-rayed rosettes with Islamic-influenced designs and capitals decorated with plant motifs enrich this gallery. The wing also contains the chapel built in 1895 and another entrance leading toward the church transept.
North and west galleries
The north wing is the shortest side of the cloister. It consists of two broad Gothic openings with ogival tracery and was built in the fourteenth century. The west wing is the latest, constructed in the fifteenth century in a Renaissance or early Renaissance style while retaining earlier Romanesque forms. Its column capitals display the heraldry of the Caldés abbesses.
Chapter house
The chapter house is entered from the northeastern angle of the cloister through a Gothic doorway built under Abbess Anglesola in the fourteenth century. Inside, an ogival cross vault covers the room, whose pavement contains several tomb slabs of former abbesses. An alabaster image of the Virgin of Mercy, attributed to Pere Johan, is also preserved there.
Modern monastic buildings
Modern restoration renewed parts of the complex and added a separate building for the nuns’ cells and work rooms. The later facilities include accommodation rooms and spaces for ceramic work, word processing, and the preparation of computer-based musical scores, extending the monastery’s physical fabric beyond its medieval church and cloister.
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