The Most Beautiful Carthusian Monasteries in the World
8 places in 3 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful Carthusian monasteries in the world are Certosa di Padula (Italy), Grande Chartreuse (France) and Certosa di Pavia (Italy). The list covers 8 Carthusian monasteries in 3 countries. Italy has the most, with 5. Last updated 14 October 2026.
The Carthusians were founded by Saint Bruno in 1084 in the Chartreuse mountains near Grenoble, and their rule is unusually solitary: each monk lives alone in a small house with its own garden, meeting the others only for some prayers and meals. That rule shapes the charterhouse. A great cloister is lined with identical doors, one for each cell, and the church and lesser cloisters gather beside it. In Italy and Spain this austere order ended up with some of the richest marble, sculpture and painting of their age.
Certosa di Padula in Campania is among the largest monastic complexes in Italy, with a vast great cloister. Grande Chartreuse, still home to monks, remains the mother house of the order. Certosa di San Martino looks over Naples from its hill, its church dressed in Baroque marble by Cosimo Fanzago, and Certosa di Pavia carries one of the most elaborately carved Renaissance façades in Lombardy. In Spain, the sacristy of the Cartuja of Granada is a high point of late Baroque, and Miraflores in Burgos keeps the alabaster royal tomb carved by Gil de Siloé.
These charterhouses were chosen for how they look and ranked by beauty. Each has its own text, a credited photograph and a pin on the map, and the section can be browsed by country.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Certosa di Padula | Carthusian monastery | Italy | ✓ |
| 2 | Grande Chartreuse | Carthusian monastery | France | |
| 3 | Certosa di Pavia | Carthusian monastery | Italy | |
| 4 | Certosa di San Martino | Carthusian monastery | Italy | |
| 5 | Florence Charterhouse | Carthusian monastery | Italy | |
| 6 | Miraflores Charterhouse, Burgos | Carthusian monastery | Spain | |
| 7 | Pisa Charterhouse | Carthusian monastery | Italy | |
| 8 | Charterhouse of Granada (La Cartuja) | Carthusian monastery | Spain |
01 Certosa di Padula
Italy · 36.1 km from Potenza40.337° N 15.652° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by gvizzari0 from Pixabay The Certosa di San Lorenzo at Padula, in the Vallo di Diano of southern Campania, is the largest charterhouse in Italy and one of the grandest in Europe: about 51,500 square metres of cloisters, gardens, courtyards and some 320 rooms, spread out at the foot of the hill town of Padula. It was founded in 1306 by Tommaso Sanseverino, lord of the valley and a loyal supporter of the Angevin kings of Naples, on the site of an older monastic grange. Dedicating it to the Carthusians, a French order, was also a political gesture towards the French-born dynasty.
Did you know? The great cloister measures roughly 104 by 150 metres, large enough to enclose more than 12,000 square metres within its arcades.
02 Grande Chartreuse
France · 21.1 km from Grenoble45.363° N 5.794° E
User:Arnejohs · Public domain In a narrow, wooded valley of the Chartreuse massif north of Grenoble lies the mother house of the Carthusian order, one of the strictest communities in the Christian world. In 1084 Saint Bruno and six companions, guided by Bishop Hugh of Grenoble, settled in this "desert" to live as hermits in community. The first monastery was destroyed in 1132 by a rockfall that swept snow before it; Prior Guigo rebuilt two kilometres lower down, on a site sheltered from falling stone, and wrote the Customs that still govern Carthusian life.
Did you know? The rockfall that destroyed the first monastery on 30 January 1132 killed seven monks; two chapels still mark the original site higher up the valley.
03 Certosa di Pavia
Italy · 24.3 km from Milan45.257° N 9.148° E
Image by Paskvi from Pixabay Carthusian monks were meant to live in silence and plainness, which makes the Certosa di Pavia one of the great contradictions of Italian art: a charterhouse for a handful of hermits whose church front is among the most lavishly carved façades of the Renaissance. Gian Galeazzo Visconti, the first Duke of Milan, laid the foundation stone on 27 August 1396 at the far end of his hunting park between Milan and Pavia, intending the church as a dynastic mausoleum after the Milanese had resisted his plans to use their cathedral for the purpose. Marco Solari began the work; the Solari family, and later Giovanni Antonio Amadeo, carried it on for a century, and the church was consecrated in 1497.
Did you know? In August 1946 the body of Benito Mussolini, stolen from a Milan cemetery months earlier, was discovered hidden inside the Certosa complex.
04 Certosa di San Martino
Italy · 0.2 km from Naples40.843° N 14.241° E
Pinotto992 · Public domain On the crest of the Vomero hill, beside Castel Sant'Elmo, the Certosa di San Martino looks down over the whole of Naples and its gulf. Together the castle and the charterhouse form the city's most visible skyline landmark. Behind the plain outer walls lies one of the richest ensembles of Neapolitan Baroque art anywhere, gathered in a Carthusian monastery of about a hundred rooms, two churches, three cloisters and hanging gardens.
Did you know? The pharmacy holds Antonio Corradini's model for the Veiled Christ, the starting point for Giuseppe Sanmartino's famous marble in the Sansevero Chapel.
05 Florence Charterhouse
Certosa di Firenze
Italy · 5.9 km from Florence43.731° N 11.221° E
Mattana · CC BY-SA 3.0 The Florence Charterhouse crowns Monte Acuto, a hill on the southern edge of Florence where the Ema and Greve rivers meet, and its long mass of walls, loggias and roofs gives it the air of a small fortified town. It was founded in 1341 by Niccolò Acciaiuoli, a Florentine banker who rose to be Grand Seneschal of the Kingdom of Naples, and was almost finished when he died in 1365. He meant it not only as a Carthusian monastery but as a place of learning, with his own palace attached.
Did you know? Pope Pius VI was held prisoner in the monastery's guest quarters in 1798–99, and Pius VII stayed there in 1809.
06 Miraflores Charterhouse, Burgos
Cartuja de Santa María de Miraflores
Spain · 2.4 km from Burgos42.338° N 3.657° W
Ecelan 08:48, 1 December 2007 (UTC) · CC BY 2.5 The Cartuja de Miraflores sits among trees on a low hill east of Burgos, and from outside it gives little away: a plain monastic enclosure and a church whose west front, in the late-Gothic Isabelline manner, carries the carved coats of arms of its royal founders. Inside that church is one of the most concentrated displays of late-15th-century sculpture in Spain, made for a single purpose, to bury a king.
Did you know? In 1445 John II gave the monks a triptych by Rogier van der Weyden; Napoleonic troops under General Darmagnac took it, and it now hangs in Berlin.
07 Pisa Charterhouse
Certosa di Pisa
Italy · 9.9 km from Pisa43.722° N 10.523° E
Gianni Careddu · CC BY-SA 4.0 At the foot of the Monte Pisano, among olive groves in a valley the monks called Val Graziosa, the graceful vale, lies one of the grandest monasteries of Tuscany. The Certosa di Calci, also known as the Pisa Charterhouse, opens onto a vast forecourt, with the Baroque church raised at the far end on a podium reached by a double staircase. Behind this ceremonial face stretches a whole silent town of cloisters, chapels, gardens and monks' houses.
Did you know? The Certosa di Calci was founded in 1366 under Francesco Moricotti, archbishop of Pisa.
08 Charterhouse of Granada (La Cartuja)
Monasterio de la Cartuja
Spain · 3.3 km from Granada37.192° N 3.600° W
Germán Póo-Caamaño from Victoria, Canadá · CC BY 2.0 The Charterhouse of Granada stands on the northern edge of the city, near today's university campus, and from outside it gives little away: a plain walled monastery with a sixteenth-century Plateresque portal. Inside is one of the summits of Spanish Baroque, a sequence of rooms in which stucco, coloured marble, inlaid wood and painting are fused into something closer to a single, blazing work of art than to architecture in the usual sense.
Did you know? The sacristy cabinets by lay brother José Manuel Vázquez are inlaid with mahogany, ebony, rosewood, ivory, tortoiseshell and silver.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What is a charterhouse?
- A charterhouse is a monastery of the Carthusian order. The English name comes from the French Chartreuse; in Italy it is a certosa and in Spain a cartuja.
- What is the most beautiful charterhouse?
- On our list, Certosa di Padula (Italy) ranks first, followed by Grande Chartreuse (France) and Certosa di Pavia (Italy).
- Which country has the most Carthusian monasteries in this collection?
- In our collection, the most come from Italy (5), Spain (2) and France (1).
- Is Chartreuse liqueur made by Carthusian monks?
- Yes. Chartreuse is made by the Carthusians of the Grande Chartreuse to a herbal recipe the order has kept for centuries.
- How many Carthusian monasteries are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 8 Carthusian monasteries in 3 countries. Italy has the most, with 5.