Every last Sunday of the month you can visit the Gothic cloister of the monastery of Santa Maria de Montsió in its current location, in Esplugues de Llobregat. It has been there since the late 1940s, but before that it was in Barcelona. First, next to the current Portal de l’Àngel, and later, on the Rambla de Catalunya, at the height of Carrer del Rosselló.
Some of the stones of the cloister still show the numbers with which they were marked in the day when it was dismantled and later rebuilt. These are numbers that are the testimony of the two transfers to which this magnificent Gothic atrium was subjected throughout its history.
The origin of the Montsió monastery dates back to 1351, when a congregation of Dominican nuns settled near Les Drassanes. After a short time, they decided to move inside the walled city for security reasons. They moved next to what is today the grounds of the old hospital of the Holy Cross, until in 1423 the nuns moved back to an old Augustinian monastery in what is now Portal de l’Ángel in its confluence with Carrer Montsió, which took precisely the name of the religious site.
It stayed there for four centuries, a period in which it reached its splendour, albeit with moments of crisis, such as the War of Succession and the Napoleonic invasion. The confiscation of 1835 forced the congregation to abandon the building, where an opera theater was installed that was the embryo of the Liceu. The nuns returned between 1845 and 1868, when the revolutionary authorities confiscated the convent again. They regained the property in 1875, but the dilapidated state of the building advised its relocation.
They then settled in a new convent that was built on the Rambla Catalunya with Rosselló, where they first moved the cloister stone by stone and where the church still stands, today converted into the parish of Sant Ramon de Penyafort .
The new convent was attacked during the Civil War. After the dispute ended, and in view of the high cost involved in restoring the site, the community decided to make another move, this time to Esplugues de Llobregat, acquired the modernist estate of Can Casanovas and moved stone for the second time by stone the traveler cloister.
The nuns left their new monastery for good in 2019, but the building and magnificent cloister are still there.
