The Most Beautiful Abbeys in Europe

27 places in 12 countries · updated 14 October 2026

1. 01 Kylemore Abbey

   Ireland53.562° N 9.889° W

   

   Margaret Henry died in 1874, of dysentery contracted on a trip to Egypt, at forty-five. Mitchell never recovered the same enthusiasm for the estate. He built a miniature Gothic Revival church a short walk from the castle as her memorial — modelled, according to the guides who show it, on Norwich Cathedral in miniature — and eventually a mausoleum where both are buried. He sold Kylemore in 1902 to the Duke and Duchess of Manchester, whose tenure ended in a mess of gambling debts, and the house stood empty and half-abandoned by 1914.

   Did you know? Kylemore Castle has about seventy rooms, including 33 bedrooms but only four bathrooms, behind walls up to three feet thick.

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2. 02 Weltenburg Abbey

   Benediktinerkloster Weltenburg

   Germany · 25.8 km from Regensburg48.899° N 11.820° E

   

   Its most dramatic period arrived a thousand years later, under Abbot Maurus Bächl in the early eighteenth century, who brought in the Asam brothers — Cosmas Damian as painter, Egid Quirin as sculptor — to rebuild the abbey church. The result is a small building carrying an outsized theatrical charge: an oval nave, a ceiling fresco that seems to dissolve the roof into open sky, and a dramatic statue of Saint George on horseback lit from a hidden window at the heart of the Asams’ theatrical altar.

   Did you know? The rider began life in 1686 as a festive equestrian figure of Elector Max Emanuel, built of metal, wood, straw and plaster to celebrate the capture of Buda.

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3. 03 Santa Maria de Montserrat Abbey

   Monasterio de Montserrat

   Spain · 36.9 km from Barcelona41.593° N 1.837° E

   

   According to legend the image of the Virgin was found in a cave on the mountain around 880, and hermitages grew up around the cult. The monastery itself was founded in 1025, with its first monks coming from the great abbey of Ripoll, and pilgrims have come ever since. In 1811 and 1812 Napoleon's troops burned and sacked the abbey twice, and much of what stands today — including the basilica, completed in its current form in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — was rebuilt afterwards. The community of monks remains active.

   Did you know? The fifteenth-century cross on the basilica's high altar is attributed to Lorenzo Ghiberti, maker of the Florence Baptistery doors.

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4. 04 Abbey of Fontenay

   Abbaye de Fontenay

   France47.640° N 4.389° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   The monks moved to the present site in 1130. The Bishop of Norwich, who took refuge here in 1139, helped pay for the church, and Pope Eugene III consecrated it in 1147. By around 1200 the complex could house up to three hundred monks, and in the 13th century it was freed from taxes and made a royal abbey. It was sacked by English troops in the Hundred Years' War and damaged again in the Wars of Religion. After the Revolution emptied it, the buildings became a paper mill. In 1906 the Lyon banker Édouard Aynard bought the property and restored it by 1911; his descendants still own it.

   Did you know? Pope Eugene III consecrated the church in 1147 in the presence of ten cardinals and eight bishops.

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5. 05 Glendalough

   Ireland · 37.7 km from Dublin53.010° N 6.327° W

   

   The tower is the image everyone keeps. It is built of mica-slate and granite and stands about 30 metres high, with its entrance set some 3.5 metres above the ground. Near it stand the cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul, the largest building on the site, with a chancel and sacristy added in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and the church known as St Kevin's Kitchen, a small building roofed entirely in stone with a miniature round belfry that looks like a chimney and gave it its name. The monastic enclosure is entered through a gateway with two storeys of granite arches — a rare survival.

   Did you know? The name comes from the Irish Gleann Dá Loch, meaning 'valley of two lakes'.

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6. 06 Poblet Monastery

   Monasterio de Poblet

   Spain · 32.2 km from Tarragona41.381° N 1.083° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   The heart of the visit is the royal pantheon in the church. Beginning with James I, the kings of Aragon chose Poblet for their tombs, and Peter IV made burial here part of the coronation oath; only Ferdinand II, who united Aragon with Castile, broke it and lies in Granada. The most important sarcophagi carry alabaster effigies, with lions at the kings' feet and dogs at the queens'. They were restored by the Catalan sculptor Frederic Marès in 1948. The altarpiece of 1527 is the work of the sculptor Damià Forment.

   Did you know? The land was given around 1150 by Ramon Berenguer IV, Count of Barcelona, to the French abbey of Fontfroide near Narbonne.

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7. 07 Sacra di San Michele

   Italy · 25.7 km from Turin45.098° N 7.343° E

   

   Its position on a pilgrim route linking France and Rome brought both traffic and money for centuries, but its most striking role came much later, in 1836, when the House of Savoy — already one of Europe's oldest ruling dynasties — moved the remains of several of its members here from Turin Cathedral, turning the mountain abbey into a royal mausoleum.

   Did you know? Visitors climb the Scalone dei Morti, the Staircase of the Dead, named for niches where skeletons of dead monks could be seen until fairly recent times.

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8. 08 Iona Abbey

   United Kingdom56.335° N 6.391° W

   

   From Iona, missionaries fanned out across northern Britain, carrying Christianity to territories that had never seen it before; the island earned its reputation as the effective birthplace of Scottish Christianity as a result. The community that grew up around Columba's original foundation also became a serious center of scholarship and craftsmanship — the Book of Kells, one of the most lavishly illustrated manuscripts to survive from the early medieval period, is thought to have been produced here before eventually making its way to Ireland, and several of the elaborately carved Celtic high crosses associated with the island were almost certainly carved by Iona's own monks.

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9. 09 Mont-Saint-Michel Abbey

   Abbaye du Mont-Saint-Michel

   France48.636° N 1.511° W

   

   Local tradition tells that in 708 the archangel appeared three times in dreams to Aubert, bishop of Avranches, until he built an oratory on what was then called Mont-Tombe. Benedictine monks were installed in 966 under Duke Richard I of Normandy, and from the eleventh century they raised the Romanesque abbey church on a platform of crypts built out over the falling rock. The great achievement of the thirteenth century is La Merveille, "the Marvel", built on the steep north face between 1211 and 1228: a Gothic block of superimposed halls, from the cellar through the Knights' Hall and the guests' hall up to the refectory and a cloister open to the sky, raised high on the rock above the sea.

   Did you know? According to legend, the archangel left a finger mark on Aubert's skull, and a skull with just such a hole is displayed in the basilica of Saint-Gervais in Avranches.

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10. 10 Melk Abbey

    Benediktinerstift Melk

    Austria48.228° N 15.331° E

    

    The building that stands today was begun in 1702 by abbot Berthold Dietmayr and his architect Jakob Prandtauer, who ran the works until his death in 1726; his nephew Joseph Munggenast finished them. It is the largest monastic complex of the Austrian Baroque, with a main axis some 320 metres long. Visitors pass through a gate flanked by bastions into a trapezoidal courtyard that draws the eye straight to the church dome, then along the Imperial Corridor, nearly 200 metres long and hung with portraits of every Babenberg and Habsburg ruler.

    Did you know? After a fire in 1974 damaged the interiors, a restoration lasting until 1995 used about eight pounds of gold to regild statues and altars.

    More about Melk Abbey →

11. 11 Abbey of Saint Gall

    Fürstabtei St. Gallen

    Switzerland · 1.1 km from St. Gallen47.423° N 9.377° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Almost nothing medieval survives above ground. In the eighteenth century the abbots swept away the old buildings and replaced them with a late Baroque ensemble, built between 1755 and 1768, with Peter Thumb among the architects. The abbey was dissolved in 1805; in the mid-nineteenth century its church became the cathedral of the new diocese of St. Gallen, with part of the monastic buildings given to the bishop.

    Did you know? Wiborada, a recluse living by the abbey and killed in a Hungarian raid in 926, became the first woman formally canonised by the Holy See, in 1047.

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12. 12 Saint Catherine of the Rock

    Eremo di Santa Caterina del Sasso

    Italy · 31.8 km from Lugano45.878° N 8.597° E

    

    What had been one man's cave grew into an organised religious site over the following two centuries. It is documented as a hermitage by 1301 and gained formal canonical status in 1334; through the thirteenth century it housed Augustinian hermits, then Ambrosian Hermits from 1379, then Carmelites from 1649. Enlightenment-era suppressions in Lombardy finally emptied it — the last six brothers left in 1770 — and the buildings that survive, clinging to the cliff face in Romanesque style, date largely from that first monastic phase in the late 1200s and early 1300s.

    Did you know? The boulders finally dropped to the floor without further damage on the night of 11–12 May 1910, and were removed only during restoration in 1983.

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13. 13 Alcobaça Monastery

    Mosteiro de Alcobaça

    Portugal · 25.9 km from Leiria39.549° N 8.979° W

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    The church follows the model of Clairvaux, the mother house in France, and it is overwhelming in its simplicity. The nave runs about 106 metres long but only about 17 metres wide, with side aisles as tall as the central one, some 20 metres, so that the interior becomes a forest of plain, pale columns rising to the vaults, lit by rows of windows. Cistercian rule forbade decoration, and the walls are almost bare; the effect is of height, proportion and light. The main façade is later, with baroque towers and statues added in the eighteenth century around the original portal and rose window.

    Did you know? Both royal tombs carry the inscription 'Até ao fim do mundo' – until the end of the world.

    More about Alcobaça Monastery →

14. 14 Pannonhalma Archabbey

    Pannonhalmi Bencés Főapátság

    Hungary · 19.1 km from Győr47.553° N 17.761° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    The buildings record the monastery's long and difficult history. The present basilica, an early Gothic church, was built at the start of the 13th century under Abbot Uros and consecrated around 1224; the wall of its south aisle belongs to an earlier church of 1137. Beneath it lies a crypt. The finest medieval piece is the Porta Speciosa, the ornate 13th-century doorway leading from the cloister into the church. King Matthias rebuilt the cloister in the late 15th century. The abbey was fortified against the Ottomans, abandoned by its monks for periods during the occupation, and rebuilt in Baroque style in the 18th century.

    Did you know? In 1096 Godfrey of Bouillon, leading one of the crusader armies, spent a week here negotiating safe passage through Hungary with King Coloman.

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15. 15 Moissac Abbey

    Abbaye Saint-Pierre de Moissac

    France · 37.6 km from Agen44.106° N 1.085° E

    

    What makes Moissac worth the detour is what the twelfth century added to it. Above the south portal sits a tympanum more than five and a half metres across, carved with the Apocalypse of John: Christ enthroned in glory at the Last Judgment, surrounded by the four beasts and the twenty-four elders. Below it, on the trumeau, a slender carved figure of the prophet Isaiah twists as if caught mid-stride — one of the most studied pieces of figure sculpture to survive from Romanesque France.

    Did you know? An inscription on a cloister pillar dates the cloister precisely to the year 1100, an unusually exact date for Romanesque sculpture.

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16. 16 Royal Monastery of San Juan de la Peña

    Real Monasterio de San Juan de la Peña

    Spain42.508° N 0.673° W

    

    Local legend tells of a young nobleman named Voto who, chasing a deer on horseback, plunged over the edge of the cliff and landed unharmed at its foot. There he found a small cave with a hermitage dedicated to Saint John the Baptist and the body of a hermit, Juan de Atarés. Voto and his brother Félix sold their possessions and settled in the cave as hermits, and tradition links the place with the legendary origins of the kingdom of Aragon. In recorded history, major building began in 1026 under Sancho the Great of Pamplona, and in 1071 King Sancho Ramírez gave the monastery to Cluniac monks.

    Did you know? The Count of Aranda, who advised on the 1770 remodelling of the pantheon, chose the monastery as his own burial place.

    More about Royal Monastery of San Juan de la Peña →

17. 17 Saint-Martin-du-Canigou

    Abbaye Saint-Martin du Canigou

    France42.528° N 2.401° E

    

    Tradition holds that Guifred built the abbey in atonement: during a campaign against Moorish raiders, he had entrusted command of his troops to his nephew Gentil, who engaged the enemy against orders, was routed, and fled to a church for sanctuary — where Guifred, finding him there, killed him in a fit of rage. This is legend rather than documented fact; no surviving charter mentions any such killing, and historians treat the story as later moralizing attached to a genuine act of monastic patronage. What is documented is that Guifred himself eventually retired to the monastery he had founded, taking vows there after abdicating his county in 1036 and dying as a monk around 1049.

    Did you know? The first church was consecrated on 10 November 1009, and a second consecration after the building was enlarged followed in either 1014 or 1026.

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18. 18 Bellapais Abbey

    Αββαείο Μπελαπάις

    Cyprus · 2.9 km from Kyrenia35.307° N 33.355° E

    

    Its first known occupants were the Canons Regular of the Holy Sepulchre, guardians of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre who fled Jerusalem after Saladin took the city in 1187. Aimery de Lusignan founded the monastery, and its earliest buildings date from 1198–1205; it was dedicated as the Abbey of St Mary of the Mountain. From 1206 the Premonstratensians, the white-robed canons, held it, which is why later documents call it the White Abbey. The church that stands today was built under King Hugh III (1267–1284), and the cloister and refectory under Hugh IV (1324–1359), who kept private apartments here.

    Did you know? The abbot held rare privileges, among them wearing a bishop's mitre at services and carrying a sword and gilded spurs outside the abbey.

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19. 19 Jumièges Abbey

    Abbaye Royale Saint-Pierre de Jumièges

    France · 18.9 km from Rouen49.432° N 0.819° E

    

    The monastery goes back to 654, when Philibert, a nobleman turned monk, founded it on land granted by the Merovingian king Clovis II and Queen Bathilde. In 841 a Viking raid burned it and the community fled with its relics and books. Monks returned around 930 under William Longsword, Duke of Normandy, and the house grew into one of the great Benedictine abbeys of the duchy. Its main church, dedicated to Notre-Dame, was begun in the first half of the eleventh century and consecrated on 1 July 1067 in the presence of William the Conqueror, freshly crowned king of England.

    Did you know? From 788 Charlemagne kept the deposed Duke Tassilo III of Bavaria and his son confined at the abbey, and their tombs inspired the legend of the Énervés de Jumièges.

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20. 20 Villers Abbey

    Abdij van Villers

    Belgium · 19.8 km from Charleroi50.591° N 4.530° E

    

    The abbey was founded in 1146, when a small community from Clairvaux, Bernard of Clairvaux's own monastery, arrived on land granted by the lord of Marbais. Local tradition holds that the monks first settled on a drier spot about a kilometre to the south and, hungry and discouraged, almost gave up before moving to the present site. That site was a marshy, rocky fold where the river makes a double bend, and the monks transformed it: they drained the ground, raised it with fill and vaulted the Thyle itself so that the abbey could be built over the river, an undertaking unmatched in other Cistercian houses. A watermill built around 1197–1200 kept working until 1897.

    Did you know? Between the 16th and 17th centuries the community abandoned the abbey nine separate times to escape war and insecurity.

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21. 21 Rievaulx Abbey

    United Kingdom · 34.2 km from York54.258° N 1.117° W

    

    The abbey's real transformation came under Ailred, who had joined as a young monk soon after the foundation and became abbot in 1147. Ailred was no provincial figure — he had served in the household of the Scottish king before taking the habit — and under him Rievaulx grew into one of the intellectual centres of English monasticism as much as a religious one; his writings on friendship and on Anglo-Saxon history were read well beyond Yorkshire. By his death in 1167 the community had swollen to some 140 choir monks and roughly 500 lay brothers, a population that made Rievaulx, briefly, one of the largest single monastic communities anywhere in Europe.

    Did you know? Roof lead cast into royal-stamped ingots at the Dissolution lay forgotten on site until the 20th century, when some was reused in York Minster's Five Sisters window.

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22. 22 Sénanque Abbey

    Abbaye Notre-Dame de Sénanque

    France43.928° N 5.187° E

    

    Cistercian monks from Mazan Abbey founded Sénanque in 1148, with the support of the Bishop of Cavaillon and the Count of Provence. The abbey church was consecrated in 1178. The valley was so tight that the builders could not orient the church in the usual way: its apse, the liturgical east end, actually faces north. The church, cloister, chapter house, dormitory and warming room, the one heated space where the monks could work in winter, survive in remarkably complete form. Together with Le Thoronet and Silvacane, Sénanque is known as one of the "Three Sisters of Provence", the three great Cistercian houses of the region.

    Did you know? From 1970 to 1988 the abbey ran a cultural centre that drew figures such as Edgar Morin, Pierre Mendès France and the sculptor Jean Tinguely.

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23. 23 San Fruttuoso Abbey

    Abbazia di San Fruttuoso

    Italy · 22.1 km from Genoa44.316° N 9.175° E

    

    To guard against Barbary pirate raids along this stretch of coast, the Doria commissioned a watchtower, the Torre Doria, built by Giovanni Ponzello in 1562. The abbey's fortunes later declined badly enough that by the seventeenth century part of it was used to shelter sheep; Camillo Doria restored the church and returned it to liturgical use in 1730.

    Did you know? Fructuosus was a third-century bishop of Tarraco, today's Tarragona, martyred during the persecutions of the Roman emperor Valerian.

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24. 24 Santa Maria de Ripoll

    Monasterio de Santa María de Ripoll

    Spain42.201° N 2.191° E

    

    The monastery was founded around 879 by Wilfred the Hairy, Count of Barcelona, as part of his effort to resettle the Pyrenean valleys, and its first church was consecrated by the bishop of Vic in 888. Wilfred chose to be buried here, and later counts of Besalú and Barcelona followed him, turning Ripoll into a dynastic pantheon. Its golden age came under Abbot Oliba in the early 11th century: he consecrated a grand new basilica in 1032, with a transept opening onto seven apses, and built up a library that grew to well over two hundred manuscripts.

    Did you know? The richly carved west portal dates from the mid-12th century and is a landmark of Catalan Romanesque sculpture.

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25. 25 Abbey of Santo Domingo de Silos

    Monasterio de Santo Domingo de Silos

    Spain41.962° N 3.419° W

    

    The abbey stands in the small village of Santo Domingo de Silos in the south of the province of Burgos. A religious house existed here in Visigothic times, and by the 10th century it was known as San Sebastián de Silos. Its revival came under Dominic, who restored it in the reign of King Ferdinand I, rebuilt the community and died in 1073; the monastery has carried his name ever since. Work on the lower cloister began in the late 11th century — a dedication is recorded for 29 September 1088 — and the upper storey followed in the 12th.

    Did you know? The cypress in the cloister garth is more than 130 years old and over 30 metres tall.

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26. 26 Sacro Speco (Monastery of Saint Benedict), Subiaco

    Monastero di San Benedetto (Subiaco)

    Italy41.917° N 13.118° E

    

    According to tradition, Benedict withdrew from the world as a youth around the end of the fifth century and spent three years in a cave above the river, fed by a monk named Romanus who lowered food to him. From Subiaco he went on to found twelve small monasteries, and the experience shaped the rule and organisation of the Benedictine order. The great abbey of Saint Scholastica, which still stands lower down the valley, flourished in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and in the thirteenth century a sanctuary was raised over Benedict's cave.

    Did you know? Legend adds that Francis of Assisi visited in 1223 and grafted roses onto those same thorn bushes.

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27. 27 Abbey of Santa María la Real de Las Huelgas

    Monasterio de Santa María la Real de Las Huelgas

    Spain · 3.7 km from Burgos42.336° N 3.720° W

    

    The buildings preserve layers from several worlds. The oldest core, a small late-Romanesque cloister known as Las Claustrillas, holds chapels decorated by craftsmen trained in the Islamic tradition: the Chapel of the Assumption, with horseshoe arches and intricate carved plaster, is one of the finest examples of Almohad-style art on Christian soil. The great church, raised in the first half of the 13th century, is a Cistercian Gothic building with three naves and a broad east end, its nave screened off as the nuns' choir and lined with royal tombs, including those of the founders.

    Did you know? Edward I of England married Eleanor of Castile at Las Huelgas in 1254.

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