FLORIDA PLACE TO EXPLORE
Ancient Spanish Monastery
Miami-Dade County · South Florida & the Keys
A Cistercian cloister built in Spain between 1133 and 1141, taken apart and rebuilt in North Miami Beach.
ABOUT THIS PLACE
It was put up at Sacramenia near Segovia as the Monastery of Our Lady, Queen of the Angels, and renamed for Saint Bernard of Clairvaux after his canonization in 1174. Monks lived in it for about seven centuries until the upheavals of the 1830s, when the cloisters were seized and turned into a granary and stable. William Randolph Hearst bought the buildings in 1925 and had them dismantled stone by stone and packed into more than eleven thousand wooden crates for shipment to America. His finances then failed and the crates sat in a Brooklyn warehouse for twenty-six years before two entrepreneurs bought the lot. Putting the stones back together took nineteen months and cost the equivalent of about twenty million dollars today. Colonel Robert Pentland Junior bought it in 1964 and gave it to the Episcopal Diocese of Florida. It is a working parish church with services in English and Spanish, and it takes weddings and visitors
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