The Old Spanish Monastery

For my recent 29th birthday, I wanted to spend a little bit of time that Sunday at the oldest building in the Western Hemisphere....which is down the street from our house! It's on the National Register of Historic Places - we're finding A LOT of those here in Miami - and is gorgeous! It's the Spanish Monastery in Miami, Fl.

The Monastery of St. Bernard de Clairvaux was built in Sacramenia, in the Province of Segovia, Spain, during the period 1133-1144.  The Cloisters (which is the portion of the monastery that was moved to the USA) were seized, sold, and converted into a granary and stable due to a social revolution in that area in the mid-1830’s. In 1925 William Randolph Hearst (yes, from Hearst Castle!) purchased the Cloisters and the Monastery’s out- buildings.  The structures were dismantled stone by stone, bound with protective hay, packed in some 11,000 wooden crates, numbered for identification and shipped to the United States. 

About that time, hoof and mouth disease had broken out in Segovia, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, fearing possible contagion, quarantined the shipment upon its arrival, broke open the crates and burned the hay, a possible carrier of the disease.  Unfortunately, the workmen failed to replace the stones in the same numbered boxes before moving them to a warehouse.  Soon after the shipment arrived, Hearst’s financial problems forced most of his collection to be sold at auction.  The stones remained in a warehouse in Brooklyn, New York, for 26 years.  One year after Hearst’s death in 1952, they were purchased by Messrs. W. Edgemon and R. Moss for use as a tourist attraction.  It took 19 months and almost $1.5 million dollars to put the Monastery back together. 

Walking around it's crazy to know that thousands of individual stones were pieced together like a puzzle. Must have been some serious divine intervention.