Santa Maria de Ripoll

The west front of Santa Maria de Ripoll carries one of the greatest sculptural ensembles of Romanesque Europe: a broad stone portal of the mid-12th century, carved in horizontal bands like the pages of an illuminated book. At the top Christ sits in majesty among the symbols of the Evangelists, angels and the Elders of the Apocalypse; below run Old Testament stories of Moses, David and Solomon, and at the bottom crouch strange beasts usually linked to the visions of Daniel. Few medieval façades anywhere tell their stories with such density, and the portal, together with the cloister, is what survived best of the abbey that Catalans often call the cradle of their nation.

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. Monks at Ripoll copied scientific texts translated from Arabic, produced great illustrated Bibles and wrote the first chronicle of the counts of Barcelona, making the abbey one of the main channels through which learning passed between al-Andalus and Latin Europe.

The later Middle Ages brought a long decline. An earthquake in 1428 wrecked much of the church, which was patched in Gothic style; then in 1835, after the monks were expelled, the church and monastery were set on fire and the archive largely lost. Restoration began in the 1880s under Bishop Josep Morgades, with the architect Elies Rogent rebuilding the basilica in an idealised Romanesque form inspired by Viollet-le-Duc; it was consecrated again in 1893. The two-storey cloister keeps much more original fabric, its lower gallery begun in the late 12th century and its upper one added in the 15th and 16th centuries. The abbey stands in the middle of Ripoll, a small industrial town of around eleven thousand people at the meeting of the Ter and Freser rivers, once famous across Europe for its forges and firearms.

Getting there

The monastery is in the centre of Ripoll, the capital of the Ripollès district in the province of Girona; the larger town of Vic lies about 30 km to the south. Ripoll has a railway station on the line from Barcelona through Vic to Puigcerdà. The nearest airport is Girona–Costa Brava (GRO), about 58 km away by straight line, while Barcelona–El Prat (BCN) is the main international gateway, roughly 100 km to the south.