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Royal Monastery of Santa Maria de Poblet

Vimbodí i Poblet, Conca de Barberà, Tarragona

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Spain › Catalonia › Tarragona › Conca de Barberà › Vimbodí i Poblet › Royal Monastery of Santa Maria de Poblet

Royal Monastery of Santa Maria de Poblet

Monument · Vimbodí i Poblet, Conca de Barberà, Tarragona

The Reial Monestir de Santa Maria de Poblet, founded in 1150 by the Cistercian order, stands at the foot of the Prades mountains, in the Conca de Barberà, within the municipality of Vimbodí i Poblet. It is one of the most important monastic complexes in Europe and, in fact, the largest inhabited monastic complex on the continent. From the reign of Peter the Ceremonious, in the 14th and 15th centuries, it became the royal pantheon of the sovereigns of the Crown of Aragon, although it also holds the tombs of earlier monarchs and various noble lineages, which has made it a symbolic reference point of the Crown since the Middle Ages. In 1921, following a visit by King Alfonso XIII, it was declared Monumento Nacional (Spain's highest level of heritage protection at the time), and in 1991 a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In 2005 it received the Creu de Sant Jordi.

Photo: Sergi Esteve (sel_commons) (CC BY-SA 3.0)

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