The Most Beautiful Monasteries in the World

79 places in 32 countries · updated 14 October 2026

1. 01 Visoki Dečani

   Manastiri i Deçanit

   Kosovo · 13.1 km from Pejë42.547° N 20.266° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   Visoki Dečani is a Serbian Orthodox monastery at the foot of the mountains on the western edge of Kosovo, and its church is the largest surviving medieval church in the Balkans. King Stefan Dečanski began it in 1327 as his own burial church; he died in 1331 before it was finished, and his son Stefan Dušan completed the work. The founding charter of 1330 survives, and so does the name of the master builder, a Franciscan friar known as Vito of Kotor, a detail that explains much of what makes the building unusual.

   Did you know? A carved inscription over the south portal names the builder as Fra Vita, a Franciscan friar from Kotor, and says the church took eight years to build.

   More about Visoki Dečani →

2. 02 Kylemore Abbey

   Ireland53.562° N 9.889° W

   

   Kylemore is the odd one in this list: not a medieval foundation but a Victorian country house that became a monastery by accident of war. Mitchell Henry, a Manchester surgeon who inherited a linen fortune, built the neo-Gothic castle on the shore of Kylemore Lough between 1867 and 1871 as a home for his wife Margaret, after the couple had fallen for the valley on their honeymoon. Granite and limestone were shipped in and cut on site; contemporary accounts put the workforce at over a hundred men for four years, an enormous undertaking for what was, at heart, a private house in one of the remotest corners of Connemara.

   Did you know? The Gothic church at Kylemore uses marble from all four Irish provinces: green Connemara, red Cork, black Kilkenny and grey Armagh.

   More about Kylemore Abbey →

3. 03 Khor Virap

   Armenia · 8.7 km from Artashat39.878° N 44.576° E

   

   Khor Virap stands on a low hill above the Ararat plain, and on a clear day it has one of the great backdrops of any church in the world: the snow-capped double summit of Mount Ararat rising beyond the vineyards and fields on the other side of the Arax river. The monastery occupies part of the site of Artaxata, the ancient Armenian capital, and its name means "deep pit" — a reference to the event that made it sacred.

   Did you know? The monastery lies only about 100 metres from the sealed Armenian–Turkish border, with the Turkish town of Aralık directly across the Arax river.

   More about Khor Virap →

4. 04 Monastery of Saint John of Rila

   Рилски манастир „Свети Йоан Рилски“

   Bulgaria42.133° N 23.340° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   This monastery takes its name from Ivan of Rila, a 10th-century hermit who — by one account, in protest at corruption he saw within the church of his time — withdrew into the mountains to live alone. He spent his final five years in a cave that still exists near the present complex, and after his death his followers built a small stone church beside it; that church still stands, older than everything else on the site, with the wider monastery gradually growing up around it under Tsar Peter I.

   Did you know? Rafail's Cross, carved by the monk Rafail over at least 12 years until 1802, packs 104 religious scenes and 650 tiny figures into wood.

   More about Monastery of Saint John of Rila →

5. 05 Jvari Monastery, Mtskheta

   Georgia · 13.2 km from Tbilisi41.838° N 44.733° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   Jvari stands alone on a rocky hilltop at 656 metres, above the point where the Aragvi runs into the Mtkvari (Kura) and across the water from Mtskheta, the old capital of the kingdom of Iberia. Georgian tradition holds that Saint Nino, who brought Christianity to the kingdom in the fourth century, raised a great wooden cross on this height, and that the cross became a place of pilgrimage. The name simply means "cross", and the stone base that is said to have held it still stands in the middle of the church.

   Did you know? Tradition says Saint Nino raised her cross on the site of a pagan temple, and the cross was said to work miracles that drew pilgrims from all over the Caucasus.

   More about Jvari Monastery, Mtskheta →

6. 06 Studenica monastery

   Манастир Студеница

   Serbia43.487° N 20.532° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   Studenica is the mother church of medieval Serbia. It was founded by Stefan Nemanja, the ruler who united the Serbian lands in the twelfth century, and the first phase of building was finished by 1196, when he abdicated and became a monk there. He died on Mount Athos, and his son Sava, the future first archbishop of the Serbian Church, brought his relics back to Studenica, which under Sava's guidance became the political, cultural and spiritual centre of the state. The monastery was placed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1986.

   Did you know? Around 1208 Saint Sava wrote the Studenica Typikon here, a rule for the monks that opens with a life of the founder, Stefan Nemanja.

   More about Studenica monastery →

7. 07 Santa Maria de Montserrat Abbey

   Monasterio de Montserrat

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

   

   The Benedictine abbey of Santa Maria de Montserrat is perched halfway up one of the strangest mountains in Europe. Montserrat — "serrated mountain" — rises 1,236 metres above the valley north-west of Barcelona in a crowd of towers and crags, and the monastery nestles among them. It is Catalonia's most important religious retreat and the home of the Virgin of Montserrat, La Moreneta, the patron saint of Catalonia.

   Did you know? A young Antoni Gaudí assisted the architect Villar i Carmona on the circular Cambril chapel behind the Virgin, built between 1876 and 1884.

   More about Santa Maria de Montserrat Abbey →

8. 08 Batalha Monastery

   Mosteiro da Batalha

   Portugal · 9 km from Leiria39.659° N 8.826° W

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   The Monastery of Batalha is a promise kept in stone. Before the Battle of Aljubarrota in 1385, King John I vowed a great church to the Virgin if Portugal defeated Castile; the victory secured the country's independence, and work began the following year. Officially Santa Maria da Vitória, the Dominican monastery took more than a century to build, through the reigns of seven kings and under some fifteen master builders, and became the burial church of the Aviz dynasty.

   Did you know? King Manuel I's motto, Leauté faray tam yaserei ("I will always be loyal"), is carved more than 200 times across the arches, vaults and pillars of the Unfinished Chapels.

   More about Batalha Monastery →

9. 09 Saint Catherine's Monastery

   Egypt28.556° N 33.976° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   Saint Catherine's Monastery sits at the foot of Mount Sinai in the mountains of the southern Sinai, and it has been inhabited by monks without interruption since the sixth century, longer than any other Christian monastery. The Byzantine emperor Justinian had it built between 548 and 565, enclosing the Chapel of the Burning Bush, which tradition traces to Empress Helena and to the place where Moses saw the bush that burned without being consumed. A centuries-old bramble in the courtyard is venerated as that very bush, and the Well of Moses, where he is said to have met Zipporah, still supplies the monks with water.

   Did you know? Until the twentieth century the only way into the monastery was through a door set high in its massive outer walls.

   More about Saint Catherine's Monastery →

10. 10 Abbey of Fontenay

    Abbaye de Fontenay

    France47.640° N 4.389° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Fontenay is the Cistercian ideal almost untouched: a monastery founded by Bernard of Clairvaux in 1118 in a wooded Burgundy valley near Montbard, and still standing with nearly all of its 12th-century buildings. Bernard wanted an order stricter than Cîteaux itself, and the architecture shows it. There is no bell tower, no carved flowers on the capitals, no painted images anywhere; the only ornament is proportion and light. It is one of the oldest and most complete Cistercian abbeys in Europe and has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1981.

    Did you know? The abbey takes its name from the many springs on the site, which lies where the Saint-Bernard combe meets the Fontenay stream valley.

    More about Abbey of Fontenay →

11. 11 Paro Taktsang

    Bhutan · 8.7 km from Paro27.492° N 89.363° E

    

    Legend holds that Guru Rinpoche, the 8th-century master credited with bringing Buddhism to Bhutan, arrived at this cliff riding on the back of a flying tigress — accounts differ on whether she was his own consort transformed, or a Tibetan emperor's former concubine turned disciple — and meditated inside the cave here for months, some tellings insisting on the oddly exact span of three years, three months, three weeks, three days and three hours, before subduing the local spirits and beginning the valley's conversion.

    Did you know? On 19 April 1998 a fire gutted the main monastery building and killed one monk; the complex was rebuilt and reconsecrated by 2005.

    More about Paro Taktsang →

12. 12 Punakha Dzong

    Bhutan · 0.3 km from Punakha27.582° N 89.863° E

    

    Punakha Dzong rises at the meeting of two rivers in the warm, low Punakha valley of western Bhutan, and few buildings anywhere sit so gracefully in their landscape. The Pho Chhu, the "male" river, and the Mo Chhu, the "female" river, join at its prow, and the fortress-monastery stretches along the tongue of land between them: long whitewashed walls rising in tiers, small windows framed in carved and painted wood, and golden-roofed towers above. Reflected in the green water of the rivers, with forested hills behind, it is one of the loveliest scenes in the Himalaya. Its formal name translates roughly as the palace of great happiness.

    Did you know? According to legend, the architect Zowe Palep saw the dzong's full plan in a dream after sleeping beside a small Buddha shrine, and built it without drawing anything on paper.

    More about Punakha Dzong →

13. 13 Hilandar

    Greece40.340° N 24.121° E

    

    Behind a ring of battlemented walls and stone towers, set a little way back from the shore on the north-eastern side of the Athos peninsula, Hilandar has been the spiritual home of the Serbian Church for more than eight hundred years. It is one of the twenty ruling monasteries of the Holy Mountain, fourth in their order of precedence, and the only one traditionally run by Serbian monks. For the Serbs it is the place where their medieval faith, writing and learning took root, and the cradle of their national Church.

    Did you know? Hilandar was founded in 1198 by the Serbian prince-turned-monk Stefan Nemanja (Saint Simeon) and his son Saint Sava.

    More about Hilandar →

14. 14 Glendalough

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

    

    Glendalough is where St Kevin withdrew into the Wicklow Mountains in the sixth century, and where the hermitage he started grew into one of the great monastic settlements of early medieval Ireland. Kevin died, according to tradition, around 618, and for centuries the valley was a place of learning and pilgrimage until the settlement was destroyed in 1398. What remains is scattered along the valley floor between wooded slopes: a cluster of stone churches, a cathedral, crosses and graves, and one of the finest round towers in the country.

    Did you know? Around 1042 oak from Glendalough was used to build Skuldelev 2, a Viking longship about 30 metres long whose replica, the Sea Stallion, is based in Roskilde.

    More about Glendalough →

15. 15 Poblet Monastery

    Monasterio de Poblet

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

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Poblet is a Cistercian abbey on the edge of the Prades Mountains in inland Catalonia, founded in 1151 by monks from France, and for centuries it was the burial place of the kings of the Crown of Aragon. It is the largest of three sister houses, together with Santes Creus and Vallbona de les Monges, that are known as the Cistercian triangle, and it was inscribed by UNESCO in 1991. The monastic buildings cover about 12,000 square metres, and at its height the community had more than 300 monks and ran a network of farms worked by lay brothers.

    Did you know? The name Poblet comes from the Latin populetum, a grove of poplars, recalling the woods that still surround the abbey.

    More about Poblet Monastery →

16. 16 Haghpat Monastery

    Armenia · 36.4 km from Vanadzor41.094° N 44.712° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Haghpat sits on a green shelf partway up the side of the Debed canyon in Armenia's northern Lori region, placed so that it would be sheltered and hard to spot from the valley floor. It was founded around 976 by Queen Khosrovanuysh, wife of the Bagratid king Ashot III, at roughly the same time as its sister monastery at Sanahin a few kilometres away. For the next three centuries it grew into one of the great centres of learning in medieval Armenia, and UNESCO listed the two monasteries together in 1996 as the high point of an architecture that fused Byzantine church design with the building traditions of the Caucasus.

    Did you know? After the 1260 siege of Mayyafariqin, Armenian and Georgian forces brought Christian relics home, and Haghpat received the hand of the Apostle Bartholomew.

    More about Haghpat Monastery →

17. 17 Jerónimos Monastery

    Mosteiro dos Jerónimos

    Portugal · 5.9 km from Lisbon38.698° N 9.206° W

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Vasco da Gama and his crew are said to have spent the night of their departure for India in 1497 praying in a small chapel on the Restelo shore, west of Lisbon. On that spot King Manuel I founded a monastery for the Hieronymite order in 1501, funded by a 5 per cent tax on the profits of trade with Africa and the East, and made it the burial place of his dynasty. The monks' duty was to pray for the king's soul and to comfort the sailors setting out from the nearby harbour. The work took about a century, and the result is the fullest expression of the Manueline style, Portugal's late Gothic, laced with carved ropes, armillary spheres and motifs drawn from the sea voyages and the lands they reached.

    Did you know? Pastéis de nata were made by the monks here from leftover egg yolks; after the monastery closed, the recipe passed to the bakery Pastéis de Belém, opened in 1837.

    More about Jerónimos Monastery →

18. 18 Sant Pere de Rodes

    Monasterio de San Pedro de Roda

    Spain42.324° N 3.167° E

    

    High on the slope of Verdera mountain, above the bays of El Port de la Selva and Llançà, the great Romanesque abbey of Sant Pere de Rodes looks out over the whole northern coast of Cap de Creus. Its church, cloister, towers and monastic ranges are laid out on terraces that follow the fall of the mountainside, and above them on the summit stand the ruins of the castle of Sant Salvador de Verdera, which once guarded the community.

    Did you know? The Rodes Bible, one of the great illuminated manuscripts of Romanesque Catalonia, was carried off by the Duke of Noailles in 1693 and is now in Paris.

    More about Sant Pere de Rodes →

19. 19 Drepung Monastery

    People's Republic of China · 6.2 km from Lhasa29.677° N 91.047° E

    

    Spilling down the foot of Mount Gephel on the western outskirts of Lhasa, Drepung is a whole town of whitewashed colleges, halls and dormitories stacked up the slope. Its Tibetan name means "rice heap", and from a distance the pale buildings piled one above another do look like a mound of grain. It was founded in 1416 by Jamyang Choje Tashi Palden, one of the leading disciples of Tsongkhapa, the reformer whose Gelug school would come to dominate Tibetan Buddhism, and it named itself after a sacred site in southern India.

    Did you know? Drepung's name means "rice heap" in Tibetan.

    More about Drepung Monastery →

20. 20 Horezu monastery

    Mănăstirea Horezu

    Romania · 30.3 km from Râmnicu Vâlcea45.169° N 24.007° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Horezu, in the foothills of the Căpățânii mountains in Wallachia, is the largest and most complete work of Prince Constantin Brâncoveanu, who ruled Wallachia from 1688 to 1714 and gave his name to a whole architectural style. Work began in 1690, the great church was consecrated on 8 September 1693, and the complex was finished in 1697. It is often described as the finest expression of the Brâncovenesc style — a blend of local Byzantine tradition with late Renaissance and Baroque carved ornament — and has been a World Heritage Site since 1993.

    Did you know? Above the church door, Brâncoveanu had carved his vow, taken from the Psalms, not to sleep or rest until he had found a dwelling place for the Lord.

    More about Horezu monastery →

21. 21 Melk Abbey

    Benediktinerstift Melk

    Austria48.228° N 15.331° E

    

    Seen from the Danube, Melk Abbey looks less like a monastery than a palace laid along a rock above the river, with twin towers and a great dome at its western end. Benedictine monks from Lambach moved into a castle here in 1089, given to them by Margrave Leopold II, and the site was already the burial place of the Babenbergs, Austria's first ruling dynasty, and of Saint Coloman. In the fifteenth century Melk led a reform movement that renewed monastic life across Austria and southern Germany, and its scriptorium made the library famous. Umberto Eco paid tribute by naming the narrator of The Name of the Rose Adso of Melk.

    Did you know? A fire in 1297 destroyed much of the medieval abbey, but the monks managed to save most of the manuscripts.

    More about Melk Abbey →

22. 22 Abbey of Saint Gall

    Fürstabtei St. Gallen

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

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    The Abbey of Saint Gall stands at the heart of the Swiss city that grew up around it, and it holds one of the oldest and most beautiful monastic libraries in the world. Tradition says that around 612 the Irish monk Gallus, a companion of Saint Columbanus, built a hermit's cell in this valley; about a century later the priest Otmar founded a Benedictine monastery on the spot. From the ninth century it was one of the leading centres of learning in Europe, home to scholars such as Notker the Stammerer, and its abbots later ruled as princes of the Holy Roman Empire. UNESCO inscribed the abbey precinct in 1983 as a perfect example of a great Carolingian monastery.

    Did you know? When fire swept through the abbey on 26 April 937 and destroyed much of it, the library survived unharmed.

    More about Abbey of Saint Gall →

23. 23 Convent of Christ

    Convento de Cristo

    Portugal · 36.3 km from Leiria39.604° N 8.419° W

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Tomar is a small city of about 20,000 people on the River Nabão in central Portugal. It grew up beneath the hilltop castle of the Knights Templar, and inside those walls stands the Convent of Christ, one of the key monuments of Portuguese history. The Templars' master in Portugal, Gualdim Pais, fortified the hill around 1160, and in about 1190 the castle held out against the army of the Almohad caliph Abu Yusuf al-Mansur. When the Templar order was dissolved in the early 14th century, King Denis persuaded the pope to create a new Portuguese order to take over its members and property. The Order of Christ was founded in 1319 and made Tomar its seat in 1357. Under the leadership of Prince Henry the Navigator, the order helped finance the voyages that opened Portugal's seaborne empire. The castle and convent were inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 1983.

    Did you know? A small carved human figure at the foot of the Chapter House window is thought to portray its designer, Diogo de Arruda.

    More about Convent of Christ →

24. 24 Sevanavank

    Armenia · 24.8 km from Gavar40.564° N 45.011° E

    

    Sevanavank stands on a narrow rocky headland above Lake Sevan, the great mountain lake of Armenia lying at about 1,900 metres. Two small stone churches with octagonal drums and conical roofs crown the ridge, with the wide blue water and the mountains of the far shore behind them — one of the best-known views in the country.

    Did you know? In the 920s King Ashot II, the Iron, took refuge on the island, and his archers firing from boats routed a much larger Arab-led army on the shore.

    More about Sevanavank →

25. 25 Gelati Monastery

    Georgia · 5.9 km from Kutaisi42.295° N 42.768° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Gelati sits on a wooded hillside above the Tskaltsitela gorge a few kilometres northeast of Kutaisi, and it was built to be both a monastery and a university. King David IV, known as David the Builder, founded it in 1106, when Kutaisi was the capital of Georgia, and gathered scholars there who had studied at the great Orthodox centres abroad, including Constantinople. Contemporaries called the Gelati Academy "a new Hellas" and "a second Athos". Among its teachers were Ioane Petritsi, the philosopher who translated and commented on Proclus, and Arsen Ikaltoeli.

    Did you know? King David the Builder asked to be buried in the monastery's south gateway so that everyone entering would step on his grave slab, as a sign of humility.

    More about Gelati Monastery →

26. 26 Hozoviotissa monastery

    Μονή της Παναγίας της Χοζοβιώτισσας

    Greece36.835° N 25.910° E

    

    A white wall pressed into a sheer cliff, some 300 metres above the Aegean, the monastery of Panagia Hozoviotissa looks less built than wedged into the rock of Amorgos. Seen from the sea or from the path below, it is a single long whitewashed facade, around 40 metres in length and nowhere more than about 5 metres deep, with the mountain rising straight up behind it and dropping straight down in front.

    Did you know? The monastery library holds about a hundred manuscript codices, written between the 10th and the 18th centuries.

    More about Hozoviotissa monastery →

27. 27 Daphni Monastery

    Μονή Δαφνίου

    Greece · 9 km from Piraeus38.013° N 23.636° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Daphni Monastery stands in a pine wood in Chaidari, about 11 km north-west of central Athens, beside the old Sacred Way that ran to Eleusis. Its name comes from the laurel groves of a sanctuary of Apollo that once stood here; one Ionic column from that temple is still built into the church, while others were taken to London by Lord Elgin. Together with Hosios Loukas and Nea Moni on Chios, Daphni is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of the three great monuments of middle Byzantine art in Greece.

    More about Daphni Monastery →

28. 28 Sümela Monastery

    Turkey · 29.1 km from Gümüşhane40.690° N 39.658° E

    

    Sümela Monastery clings to a sheer cliff on Mount Mela (Karadağ), about 1,200 metres above sea level, above the forested gorge of the Altındere valley in the Pontic Mountains behind Trabzon. From below it looks less like a building than a pale stripe of walls, windows and balconies stuck to the rock face, and the whole complex is shaped by that setting: rooms, chapels and terraces are packed onto a narrow ledge, fed in the past by an aqueduct that brought water along the cliff.

    Did you know? Forbidden to take property when they left in 1923, the monks buried the famous icon under the floor of the chapel of Saint Barbara.

    More about Sümela Monastery →

29. 29 Alcobaça Monastery

    Mosteiro de Alcobaça

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

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    The Monastery of Santa Maria at Alcobaça is the largest church in Portugal and one of the purest works of Cistercian Gothic in Europe. The first king of Portugal, Afonso Henriques, gave the land to Bernard of Clairvaux in 1153, after taking Santarém from the Moors, as part of his strategy of settling and securing newly conquered territory. Construction of the stone monastery began in 1178, the monks moved in in 1223 and the church was consecrated in 1252. By around 1300 Alcobaça was the richest and most powerful monastery in the kingdom, with a large community of monks and vast estates.

    Did you know? Pedro and Inês lie foot to foot across the transept, so that, as tradition has it, the first thing each sees on Judgement Day will be the other.

    More about Alcobaça Monastery →

30. 30 Pannonhalma Archabbey

    Pannonhalmi Bencés Főapátság

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

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Pannonhalma Archabbey has crowned its 282 m hill above the plains of north-western Hungary for more than a thousand years. Prince Géza founded it in 996 as the first Benedictine monastery in Hungary. His son, King Stephen I, the country's first Christian king, endowed it with lands and privileges. It is dedicated to Saint Martin of Tours, who by tradition was born at the foot of this hill. About fifty monks still live here and run a well-known boys' boarding school, so this is a working community, not a museum. In 1996, the abbey's millennium year, it was listed as a World Heritage Site together with its natural surroundings.

    Did you know? Pannonhalma is the second-largest territorial abbey in the world, after Monte Cassino.

    More about Pannonhalma Archabbey →