ANCIENT SPANISH MONASTERY

 

16711 West Dixie Highway
North Miami Beach, FL 33160 
(305) 945-1461

Fax: (305) 945-6896

www.spanishmonastery.com

Email: monastery@earthlink.com

Open: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Saturday

1:30 to 5:30 p.m. on Sundays.

Closed: January 1^st, July 4^th, Thanksgiving, December 25th and for three days during Holy Week.

Admission: $4.50 for adults, $2.50 for seniors and $1 for children under 12.

Hidden in the hubbub of busy downtown North Miami Beach, lodged behind a shopping center and a tennis center is one of Miami-Dade County’s gems of an attraction. Pull into the oak-shaded parking lot and step into another world.

Officially the cloister of the Monastery of St. Bernard de Clairvaux, the building was constructed as the Monastery of Our Lady, Queen of the Angels, in Segovia, Spain between 1133 to 1141. After the canonization of St. Bernard de Clairvaux, it was renamed in his honor and occupied by Cistercian monks for nearly seven centuries.

When Arthur Byne, an agent for newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst located it, the monastery’s cloister was being used for storage and had fallen into disrepair. In the mid-1920’s Hearst was buying old edifices for his California castle, San Simeon, and the cloister and a few other portions of the monastery were available and appealed to him.

Hearst sent experts to diagram the cloister, dismantle it and ship it to the United States. Every stone, every font and fountain and every statue were disassembled, numbered, carefully packed in straw and fitted into individually made crates with numbers corresponding the numbers on the stones. But a hoof-and-mouth disease scare in the U.S. resulted in each of the crates being opened, the stones washed, and the straw removed and burned since it could have been contaminated by the bacteria that caused the disease. The stones were then haphazardly returned to the boxes, which were shipped off to a warehouse in Brooklyn. The stock market crashed and the mix-and-match monastery was forgotten in the confusion and uncertainty that followed.

In the mid-1950s, following Hearst’s death, his possessions and properties were being sold off and the monastery cloister was among the holdings placed up for sale. Two South Floridians, Raymond Moss and William Edgemon, bought the monastery and shipped the boxes to a small nursery site in northern Miami-Dade County where it took several years to sort out the pieces and re-assemble the cloister.

The Ancient Spanish Monastery has never been promoted as aggressively as many of South Florida’s other tourist attractions, but it remains a place of historical interest as well as one of beauty. The formal garden, with its hedges of ixora and Suriman cherry and dozens of beautiful plant species, from delicate orchids and milk and honey lillies to thorny bougainvillea and sausage trees are a perfect spot for solitude and reflection. In addition to its value as an attraction, the monastery is a favorite spot for formal weddings.

The 6-acre Ancient Spanish Monastery is listed in the National Register of Historical Places and the Florida List of Historical Sites.