Monasterio-de-Piedra

	11CHLIE Companions Programme
	Until the twelfth century the Monasterio de Piedra, placed at Nuevalos at about 100 km from Zaragoza, was a Moorish castle. Then, Alfonso the Second, King of Aragon, conquered it and gave it to the Cistercian monks. He thought this would be a way to extend to all this region the influence of Catholicism. The monks came here from Poblet and built the monastery in twenty-tree years, using the old stones from the Moorish castle. The monks lived here for seven hundred years, surviving several wars. In 1935 the law closed all the monasteries and five years later (1840) the monastery was sold. The family who bought it has conserved it until now, so that this is a private property.
The natural park of the Monasterio de Piedra offers us one of the most gratifying experiences that one can find over the world, an unusual garden round the water and its movement on waterfalls and caverns. This one is an excursion at one of the most extraordinary natural curiosities of Europe.
		To the North is the church, the kitchen and the dining room are in the South, the storage for food and wine in the West and in the East is the chapter house where the monks talked about important things like choosing a new abbot, administration and public confessions. This distribution was designed in order to make the use of day light.