Sant Llorenç del Munt Monastery

Few monuments demand so much and give back so much as Sant Llorenç del Munt. The monastery crowns the summit of La Mola, in the heart of the Sant Llorenç del Munt i l'Obac Natural Park, straddling the Bages and Vallès Occidental districts, within the municipality of Matadepera. Nobody ends up here by chance: you have to climb, and on reaching the top you are greeted by a Romanesque church of reddish stone, sober and compact, as if it had sprung from the mountain itself.

What you see today is the result of a reconstruction carried out between the late 19th and mid-20th centuries, but one faithful to the structure built in the mid-11th century. That faithfulness makes it one of the few surviving examples of a purely Romanesque monastery. The curious thing is that it is an exact copy, at half the size, of the abbey of Sant Cugat, which promoted its construction and on which it almost always depended. Three naves, a transept supporting the lantern tower on its transverse arches, and a bell tower, all built from modest, unpolished local stone. Not a single ornament: just a small doorway and the eloquence of bare architecture.

Its history begins in the 10th century, when documents refer to churches on the summit, including a donation by Count Borrell II to the abbot of Sant Cugat and another by a married couple from Terrassa, Ansolf and Rímula. By 1014 it was already mentioned as a monastery, and by 1018 it had its own abbot. While the Saracens plundered the plain below, the summit seems to have been spared, which favoured the Romanesque building work, probably begun in 1045 and consecrated in 1064 by the bishop and the Counts of Barcelona.

Decline set in from the 12th century: the odd Benedictine monk held out until 1608, and a priest is still recorded in 1637, before the site was abandoned. The final blow came from Napoleon's troops on 30 March 1809, who razed what remained and even desecrated the abbots' tombs.