Royal Monastery of Santa Maria de Pedralbes

Historic · Pedralbes (Les Corts / Sarrià-Sant Gervasi boundary)Barcelona,Spain

A Poor Clare monastery on Barcelona's edge whose founding queen had herself carved twice, crowned from the church and a widow from the cloister.

Pedralbes is a Poor Clare monastery on the edge of Barcelona whose founder had herself carved twice. Elisenda de Montcada's tomb is set into the wall between the church and the cloister, with a face on each side. From the church she is a crowned queen of Aragon; from the cloister, a widow in a Poor Clare's habit with her hands together. Both portraits were cut while she was alive. She founded the house in 1327, a few months before the king died. The cloister is three storeys high, which is rare, and almost nothing in it has been rebuilt. Small day cells open off the ground-floor walk, one to a nun. In one corner is the chapel of Sant Miquel, a room no bigger than a bedroom, painted between 1343 and 1346 by Ferrer Bassa for a single nun's private prayer. It holds the earliest Italian-influenced painting in Catalonia, and its detail has survived unusually well. From the ground the arcades stack three deep overhead, with sky at the top and no sound from the city below.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Ask about the Sant Miquel chapel on arrival — the paintings are kept under strict light control and the room may open only in short intervals, so do not build the visit around finding it lit.
Give it a slow hour — the interest here is in small rooms rather than big spaces, and the day cells and the cloister only work if you stop in them rather than walking the circuit once.
It stays empty because it is far — the journey out and the walk uphill keep the numbers down, so this is the one large medieval interior in the city you can usually have to yourself.

Things to do

1
See the same tomb twice
Find the tomb from inside the church first, where the figure is crowned and dressed as a queen. Then go out into the cloister and look at the other side of the same wall. The same woman lies there in a nun's habit. Nothing else in the city states a person's two lives so plainly in stone.
2
Circle the cloister at ground level, slowly
Take the ground gallery all the way round and look up at each corner: three tiers of arcading, palm and orange trees in the garth, a well in the middle. Then stop and listen. The traffic of the city does not reach here, and the loudest sound is usually birds in the enclosure.
3
Measure a day cell from its doorway
Look into one of the small rooms off the cloister and take in its size. There is space for a stool, a shelf and a window. This is where a nun spent the hours she was not in choir, alone, every day for decades, and the scale of the room is the clearest thing the monastery has to say.