The Most Beautiful Monasteries in Europe
41 places in 16 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful monasteries in Europe are Visoki Dečani (Kosovo), Kylemore Abbey (Ireland) and Monastery of Saint John of Rila (Bulgaria). The list covers 41 monasteries in 16 countries. Greece has the most, with 10. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Europe's monasteries are the work of more than fifteen hundred years of communities choosing places apart: mountain valleys, river bends, rocky heights and remote lakesides. Two traditions shaped them. In the Orthodox east, monasteries gathered around a single painted church, with frescoes covering every wall; in the Latin west, Benedictine and later Cistercian rules produced cloisters, chapter houses and great churches organised around daily prayer and work.
The Orthodox side of the list is strong in fresco. Visoki Dečani, a fourteenth-century Serbian Orthodox monastery, keeps one of the largest cycles of medieval wall painting in the Balkans, and Studenica, founded by Stefan Nemanja in the twelfth century, is built of white marble. The Rila Monastery in Bulgaria wraps its striped arcades around a painted church deep in the mountains, while Jvari stands alone on a hilltop above the meeting of two rivers at Mtskheta.
In the west, the Abbey of Fontenay preserves the austere early Cistercian ideal, and Poblet in Catalonia served as a royal pantheon of the Crown of Aragon. Montserrat sits among serrated rock pinnacles near Barcelona. Portugal contributes the Gothic Batalha Monastery and the Manueline Jerónimos Monastery in Lisbon, built in the age of the sea voyages. Ireland adds two opposites: the early monastic settlement of Glendalough with its round tower, and Kylemore Abbey, a nineteenth-century castle on a Connemara lake.
In this list
01 Visoki Dečani
Manastiri i Deçanit
Kosovo · 13.1 km from Pejë42.547° N 20.266° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Pudelek (Marcin Szala) · CC BY-SA 3.0 Vito brought the Romanesque and Gothic habits of the Adriatic coast to an Orthodox commission. The walls are laid in alternating bands of pale and pinkish marble, and the portals, windows and capitals carry carved sculpture of a kind rarely seen on Byzantine-rite churches. Inside, the plan is a five-aisled nave with a three-part iconostasis and a spacious narthex, and nearly every surface is painted.
Did you know? Its unusual proportions, about 36 metres long, earned the monastery its epithet Visoki, meaning high, among the far smaller churches of medieval Serbia.
02 Kylemore Abbey
Ireland53.562° N 9.889° W
Image by uncutURBEX from Pixabay 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.
03 Monastery of Saint John of Rila
Рилски манастир „Свети Йоан Рилски“
Bulgaria42.133° N 23.340° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by vladunis from Pixabay Almost none of that early growth survived a single night in January 1833, when a fire tore through the timber-built residential quarters and destroyed nearly the entire medieval complex. The one structure left standing was the Hrelyo Tower, a 23-metre stone keep raised in 1335 for the local feudal lord Hrelyo Dragovol — its fifth-floor chapel still holds fragments of frescoes painted in the 1330s, the oldest paintings anywhere on the site.
Did you know? The monk Rafail is said to have lost his sight once he had finished carving the cross.
04 Jvari Monastery, Mtskheta
Georgia · 13.2 km from Tbilisi41.838° N 44.733° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Alexxx1979 · CC BY-SA 4.0 A small church was built beside the cross around 545, and the church that dominates the hill today followed at the turn of the sixth and seventh centuries, commissioned by the ruling princes of Kartli. It has come down to us almost unaltered, which is rare for a building of that age in Georgia. The plan is a tetraconch: four apses open off a central square, and between them deep niches and squinches carry the drum and dome without a single free-standing pillar. At only about 25 metres high, the interior feels far larger than it is, and the design became a model copied across Georgia and Armenia, where churches of this form are still called the Jvari type.
Did you know? The dome rests on three tiers of squinches, ending in a ring of 32 facets, so that no pillar interrupts the single open interior.
05 Studenica monastery
Манастир Студеница
Serbia43.487° N 20.532° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Pudelek · CC BY-SA 3.0 The main church, dedicated to the Virgin, is one of the finest buildings of the Middle Ages in the Balkans. It is a single-nave domed church faced entirely with slabs of white marble, and it blends Romanesque form, visible in the carved portals and windows, with a Byzantine dome and interior: the mixture that became known as the Raška school. The masons probably came from the Adriatic coast, perhaps from Kotor. The west portal is the finest of the four carved doorways, and a window under the dome carries medallions with eight fantastic animals, symbols of the Virgin's virtues.
Did you know? Sava's Typikon placed Studenica's abbot above all other Serbian abbots and gave the ruler no authority over the monastery beyond protecting it.
06 Santa Maria de Montserrat Abbey
Monasterio de Montserrat
Spain · 36.9 km from Barcelona41.593° N 1.837° E
Image by MH_Stuttgart from Pixabay 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.
07 Batalha Monastery
Mosteiro da Batalha
Portugal · 9 km from Leiria39.659° N 8.826° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by josefko48 from Pixabay The first architect, Afonso Domingues, gave the church its plan and an English flavour — his work has been compared to York and Canterbury, a link strengthened by the king's English queen, Philippa of Lancaster. His successor Huguet raised the nave to about 32 metres while keeping it only 22 metres wide, so the plain interior feels astonishingly tall and narrow, lit by some of the oldest stained glass in Portugal. Huguet also built the Founder's Chapel, where John and Philippa lie hand in hand under an eight-sided star vault, surrounded by the tombs of their sons, among them Henry the Navigator.
Did you know? The Manueline portal of the Unfinished Chapels rises about 15 metres, a lacework of armillary spheres, ropes and angels completed by Mateus Fernandes in 1509.
08 Abbey of Fontenay
Abbaye de Fontenay
France47.640° N 4.389° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by guy_dugas from Pixabay 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.
09 Hilandar
Greece40.340° N 24.121° E
Image by mirkosajkov from Pixabay The story begins with a royal abdication. Stefan Nemanja, Grand Prince of Serbia, gave up his throne in 1196, became the monk Simeon and joined his youngest son Rastko, who had already fled to Athos and taken the name Sava. In 1198 the Byzantine emperor Alexios III granted them the ruins of an older Greek monastery, laid waste by pirates, to be rebuilt as a house for Serbian monks. Simeon died here in 1200; Sava went on to become the first archbishop of an independent Serbian Church and wrote the rule by which Hilandar lived.
Did you know? It is the only Serbian monastery among the twenty ruling monasteries of Mount Athos and ranks fourth in their hierarchy.
10 Glendalough
Ireland · 37.7 km from Dublin53.010° N 6.327° W
Image by desimaxwell from Pixabay 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'.
11 Poblet Monastery
Monasterio de Poblet
Spain · 32.2 km from Tarragona41.381° N 1.083° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Angela Llop from Spain · CC BY-SA 2.0 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.
12 Jerónimos Monastery
Mosteiro dos Jerónimos
Portugal · 5.9 km from Lisbon38.698° N 9.206° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by LoggaWiggler from Pixabay The first architect, Diogo de Boitaca, laid out the church and the cloister; the Spaniard Juan de Castillo took over around 1517 and brought in Plateresque ornament, and later Renaissance masters finished it. The south portal, 32 metres high and crowded with carved saints under canopies around a statue of Henry the Navigator, is the famous face of the building, although the real entrance is the smaller west door by Nicolau Chanterene, with kneeling figures of King Manuel and Queen Maria. Inside, the church of Santa Maria is a hall church whose single ribbed vault spans 19 metres, carried on six slender octagonal columns 25 metres high and covered in Renaissance carving.
Did you know? The original recipe is still said to be kept in a secret room at the Belém bakery that inherited it from the monastery.
13 Sant Pere de Rodes
Monasterio de San Pedro de Roda
Spain42.324° N 3.167° E
Pixel · Public domain Legend places the origin of the monastery in the early 7th century: monks fleeing invaders are said to have hidden relics of Saint Peter and other saints here, and Pope Boniface IV is said to have ordered a monastery to be built on the spot once the danger had passed. The documents begin in 878, when the place appears as a modest cell dependent on the monastery of Banyoles. In the 10th century the magnate Tassi and his son Hildesind, its first abbot, turned it into an independent Benedictine abbey in 945, answerable only to the Holy See.
Did you know? Written in the first quarter of the 11th century, the Rodes Bible originally had 566 folios and was split into four volumes in the 18th century.
14 Horezu monastery
Mănăstirea Horezu
Romania · 30.3 km from Râmnicu Vâlcea45.169° N 24.007° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
seriykotik1970 from Moscow Russia · Public domain The monastery is laid out on an east–west axis around a rectangular walled courtyard. Along the north side run the monks' cells, now the nuns' quarters, behind a long arcade; on the south stands the princely residence with its bell tower and council hall; the refectory with a chapel above closes the west side. The ensemble is completed by a hospital church founded by Brâncoveanu's wife Maria in 1696 and two small hermitages outside the walls, the Holy Apostles (1698) and Saint Stephen (1703).
Did you know? Hurezi is regarded as the largest monastic ensemble in Romania, laid out with four places of worship built by different founders.
15 Melk Abbey
Benediktinerstift Melk
Austria48.228° N 15.331° E
Image by ArmbrustAnna from Pixabay 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.
16 Abbey of Saint Gall
Fürstabtei St. Gallen
Switzerland · 1.1 km from St. Gallen47.423° N 9.377° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Rocky187 · CC BY-SA 4.0 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.
17 Convent of Christ
Convento de Cristo
Portugal · 36.3 km from Leiria39.604° N 8.419° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Alvesgaspar · CC BY-SA 3.0 The oldest and most striking building is the Charola, the Templars' round church of the late 12th century. From outside it is a sixteen-sided fortress-like drum with buttresses and round windows; inside, an octagonal core is ringed by an ambulatory, a plan modelled on round buildings in Jerusalem such as the Holy Sepulchre. From 1499 King Manuel I had it covered in late Gothic decoration: polychrome statues of saints and angels under elaborate canopies by the sculptors Olivier de Gand and Hernán Muñoz, and wall paintings from the workshop of the court painter Jorge Afonso.
Did you know? The convent has eight cloisters in all, built over roughly two centuries between the 15th and 17th centuries.
18 Gelati Monastery
Georgia · 5.9 km from Kutaisi42.295° N 42.768° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Makalu from Pixabay The main church, dedicated to the Virgin, was completed in 1130 under David's son Demetrius I, and smaller churches and a bell tower were added over the following centuries. They are built of solid stone on a cross-shaped plan, with walls meant to catch the sunlight and be seen far across the country, a showpiece of the Georgian Golden Age. The prize inside is the mosaic in the apse, a twelfth-century image of the Virgin holding the Christ Child in the Byzantine manner, counted among the great works of Georgian art. Some of the murals inside also date back to the twelfth century.
Did you know? His tombstone carries an inscription in which the king declares the spot his resting place forever, the place where he chose to dwell.
19 Hozoviotissa monastery
Μονή της Παναγίας της Χοζοβιώτισσας
Greece36.835° N 25.910° E
Apenauta at Italian Wikipedia · Public domain Its name is a traveller's name. It derives from Hozeva, or Koziva, the old toponym of the gorge now known as Wadi Qelt in Palestine, where the Orthodox monastery of Saint George of Choziba stands. Local tradition holds that during the period of Byzantine Iconoclasm an icon of the Virgin came ashore by sea in the bay of Agia Anna, just below the cliff, and that the first monastery was raised here in the 9th century to shelter it.
Did you know? Its most precious manuscript is an 11th-century Gospel book decorated with six illuminated miniatures.
20 Daphni Monastery
Μονή Δαφνίου
Greece · 9 km from Piraeus38.013° N 23.636° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Sp!ros · CC BY-SA 4.0 A first monastery was founded here in the late 6th century, but the church visitors see today dates from the late 11th century, a period of renewed prosperity. After the Fourth Crusade, Frankish lords handed Daphni to Cistercian monks, who added a Gothic cloister and pointed arches to the facade; the monastery became a favoured burial place for crusader knights. The Cistercians left in 1458, soon after the Ottoman conquest.
21 Alcobaça Monastery
Mosteiro de Alcobaça
Portugal · 25.9 km from Leiria39.549° N 8.979° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by vikol009 from Pixabay 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.
22 Pannonhalma Archabbey
Pannonhalmi Bencés Főapátság
Hungary · 19.1 km from Győr47.553° N 17.761° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by jimmyimi from Pixabay 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.
23 Nea Moni of Chios
Νέα Μονή Χίου
Greece · 7 km from Chios38.374° N 26.056° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
RomkeHoekstra · CC BY-SA 4.0 Imperial privileges made the monastery rich. By around 1300 its estates covered a third of the island and hundreds of monks belonged to it, and it kept considerable autonomy under the Genoese and Ottomans. The disaster came in April 1822, during the Greek War of Independence, when Ottoman forces sacked Chios: some 2,000 people sheltered in the monastery, the troops stormed it, killed many of them and set fire to the church. An earthquake in 1881 brought down the dome. Since 1952 the monastery has been a convent, with only a handful of nuns.
24 Ostrog Monastery
Montenegro · 30.3 km from Podgorica42.675° N 19.029° E
Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 3.0 The monastery grew around a hermit. In the seventeenth century Vasilije Jovanović, Metropolitan of Herzegovina, withdrew to a cave here, and the community he founded appears on a map of Montenegro by 1640. He died at Ostrog in 1671 and was soon venerated as Saint Basil of Ostrog; his body lies in a reliquary in the cave church of the Presentation of the Mother of God. Pilgrims come to pray beside it, and many recount healings and help received there. Local tradition treats a vine that grows straight out of the bare rock near the upper church as a small miracle of its own.
Did you know? Before retreating to the cliff, Basil studied at the monasteries of Zavala and Tvrdoš and served from 1639 as Bishop of Zahumlje.
25 Vézelay Abbey
Basilique Sainte-Marie-Madeleine
France · 39.6 km from Auxerre47.466° N 3.748° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Benjamin Smith · CC BY-SA 4.0 The inner portal of the narthex is the reason many people come. Its tympanum does not show the Last Judgment, as most Romanesque portals do, but is usually read as the Pentecost — Christ sending the apostles out to all the peoples of the world. On the lintel below file the nations still waiting for the Word, carved as not quite human: some with pig snouts, some misshapen, some as tiny figures — a medieval map of the known and imagined world. Inside, the carved capitals of the nave continue the story in dozens of lively scenes.
Did you know? Freed captives brought their chains to the abbey as thanks to Mary Magdalene, and the iron was reforged into railings around her altar.
26 Monastery of Saint Naum
Манастир „Св. Наум“ - Охрид
North Macedonia · 6.6 km from Pogradec40.914° N 20.741° E
Poppit2 · Public domain Its founder, Naum, was a disciple of Saints Cyril and Methodius and a companion of Clement of Ohrid, part of the circle that carried the new Slavonic liturgy and alphabet into the First Bulgarian Empire. The monastery was established around the turn of the 10th century, traditionally dated to 905, with the support of the Bulgarian rulers Boris and Simeon, and dedicated to the Holy Archangels. Naum died in 910 and was buried in his own church; he was soon venerated as a saint, and his tomb became a place of pilgrimage. In Ottoman times Muslims came here as well: the Bektashi believed their holy man Sari Saltik lay buried at the site, and the relics were thought to cure illnesses of the mind.
Did you know? Frescoes in the chapel above the tomb illustrate Naum's miracles, among them the saint harnessing a bear and the healing of the mentally ill.
27 Pena Palace
Portugal · 22.3 km from Lisbon38.788° N 9.391° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Singa Hitam · CC BY 2.0 The site was first a small Hieronymite monastery dedicated to Our Lady of Pena, which the great earthquake of 1755 left in ruins. In 1838 Ferdinand II, king consort of Queen Maria II, bought the ruins together with the surrounding land and commissioned the German mining engineer and amateur architect Baron Wilhelm Ludwig von Eschwege to turn them into a summer residence. Work ran from 1842 to 1854, though the main structure stood by 1847.
Did you know? The present High Cross is a replica carved in 2008 from a single block of limestone, after lightning destroyed Ferdinand II's Manueline-style cross in 1997.
28 Royal Monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial
Real Monasterio de San Lorenzo de El Escorial
Spain40.589° N 4.148° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by hruskajar from Pixabay The first architect, Juan Bautista de Toledo, laid out the plan; after his death his pupil Juan de Herrera carried the work through and gave his name to the sober Herrerian style that proved widely influential. The plan is a grid of courtyards and passages. Tradition says it recalls the gridiron on which Saint Lawrence was martyred, though scholars more often trace it to descriptions of the Temple of Solomon. At its centre stands the basilica, entered across the Courtyard of the Kings with its statues of the kings of Judah; Herrera reworked it as a Greek cross, and its dome, inspired by St Peter's in Rome, rises nearly 100 metres.
Did you know? In Spanish, 'la obra de El Escorial' became a proverb for any job that takes forever to finish.
29 Simonopetra Monastery
Ιερά Μονή Σίμωνος Πέτρας
Greece40.190° N 24.247° E
Original uploader was Michalis Famelis at en.wikipedia · CC BY-SA 3.0 Tradition holds that the monastery was founded in the thirteenth century by the hermit Simon the Athonite, who saw a vision of the Mother of God on the rock on the night of the Nativity and named the place New Bethlehem; the monastery is still dedicated to the Nativity of Christ. In 1364 the Serbian ruler Jovan Uglješa paid for a major renewal, and later princes, including Michael the Brave of Wallachia, helped after disasters. Fire has been the monastery's great enemy: blazes in 1581, 1626 and 1891 destroyed much of it, and the building seen today was completed in 1902 after the last fire, reusing the old site on the same narrow summit.
Did you know? The monastery is built so tightly onto its crag that the living rock runs up through its lower floors.
30 Iviron Monastery
Greece40.246° N 24.285° E
Unknown author Unknown author · Public domain The monastery was founded between 980 and 983 by two Georgians, John the Iberian and John Tornike, a nobleman and former general who had given up military life for the cloister. Generously endowed by Georgian kings, it became a centre of scholarship where monks such as Euthymius and George the Hagiorite rendered Greek theology into Georgian. As the kingdom of Georgia weakened in the later Middle Ages, Greek monks gradually took over the community, and from the fourteenth century Georgians were a minority, although a small Georgian presence lasted into the twentieth century.
Did you know? The name Iviron comes from the Greek word for Iberians, the historical name for Georgians.
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 are the most beautiful monasteries in Europe?
- On our list, Visoki Dečani (Kosovo) ranks first, followed by Kylemore Abbey (Ireland) and Monastery of Saint John of Rila (Bulgaria).
- Which country has the most monasteries in Europe?
- In our collection, the most come from Greece (10), Portugal (6) and Spain (5).
- What is the difference between a monastery and an abbey?
- Every abbey is a monastery, but not every monastery is an abbey. An abbey is a monastery or convent governed by an abbot or abbess, usually in the Benedictine or Cistercian tradition.
- What is Manueline architecture?
- Manueline is the ornate late Gothic style of Portugal around 1500, named after King Manuel I. It is known for maritime motifs such as twisted ropes, armillary spheres and sea creatures, seen at the Jerónimos Monastery and Batalha.
- Why do Irish monastic sites have round towers?
- Tall stone round towers, like the one at Glendalough, were built by early medieval Irish monasteries mainly as bell towers, and probably also served as landmarks and places to store valuables.
- How many monasteries are on this list in Europe?
- The list covers 41 monasteries in 16 countries. Greece has the most, with 10.