Poblet Monastery

Poblet Monastery, at the foot of the Prades Mountains in Vimbodi i Poblet, Tarragona province, Catalonia, Spain, was founded in 1151 by Cistercian monks from France and became one of the three so-called Cistercian triangle monasteries that consolidated religious and political power in twelfth-century Catalonia. King Peter IV of Aragon made it the royal pantheon of the Crown of Aragon, decreeing that the kings of Aragon be buried there, and at its height the community supported more than three hundred monks with extensive agricultural estates. The monastery was closed during Spanish secularization in 1835 and stood empty until Italian monks refounded it in 1940. Poblet was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1991, and it remains an active community of around thirty professed monks; its royal tombs, carved in alabaster, were restored by the sculptor Frederic Mares in 1948.