The History of Montserrat

A thousand years of continuous Benedictine life on a rock shelf, a destruction that took almost all of it, and a rebuilding that is most of what visitors see. The dates below are the ones the abbey and the Montserrat visitor service publish, and they are worth carrying up the mountain on any Montserrat Barcelona guided tour.

888: the first record of life on the mountain

The earliest documented activity on Montserrat is dated to 888, and tradition puts the finding of the image at the Santa Cova, the grotto below the ledge the monastery now stands on. Before that the massif is a landscape rather than a place in the record: a wall of conglomerate above the Llobregat, visible from most of central Catalonia and inhabited by nobody in particular.

What the record shows from the ninth century is small: hermitages, chapels, people living alone on a mountain that is hard to live on. The monastery came later and grew out of that habit.

1025: Oliba founds the monastery

In 1025 Oliba, Abbot of Ripoll and Bishop of Vic, founded the monastery at a hermitage already standing on the mountain. Oliba is one of the significant figures of eleventh-century Catalonia, a builder of institutions rather than of buildings, and Montserrat is the one that outlasted everything else he set up.

From that date the community has been Benedictine and has not been interrupted. That is a thousand years of the same rule in the same place, which is rarer than the buildings suggest.

The hermitages on the ridge

Through the middle ages the mountain filled with hermitages: individual cells strung across the massif, each with a path to it. Their remains are still there, and the path network that walkers use today was made by monks going between them centuries before anyone considered a funicular. The routes are set out on the natural park page.

1811, and what was lost

Napoleon's troops destroyed the monastery in 1811. The buildings went, and the mountain kept its community: the monks returned and rebuilt. It is the sharpest single break in the story and the reason a place founded in 1025 looks nineteenth-century.

A chronology in six lines

Montserrat as a Catalan symbol

The mountain is on the Catalan horizon in a literal sense — you can see it from a great deal of the country — and it became a symbol in a political one as well. The Virgin of Montserrat is Catalonia's patroness and her feast falls on 27 April, when the museum opens free. A great many Catalan girls are called Montserrat, which is the most everyday evidence of how far that reach goes.

The abbey today

Still a monastery, still Benedictine, and still running a choir school that sings in the basilica six days a week. The museum, the audiovisual space and the shops sit alongside it, and several million visitors a year arrive by two railways. What is unusual is that none of it is ticketed at the door.

Reading the dates on a visit

Three things are worth looking for once you know the sequence. The image, above the altar, predates every wall around it. The rebuilding is visible in the stonework of the main block. And the hermitage paths still run out from the square in every direction, which is the oldest thing on the mountain that you can actually walk on. The rest of the complex is set out on the monastery page.

Frequently asked about the history