The monastery was born of conquest and quiet. King Alfonso II of Aragon founded it in 1194 as the first Carthusian house on the Iberian Peninsula, part of a deliberate effort to repopulate the recently reconquered lands of Catalunya Nova. The Carthusians, an order devoted to silence, solitude, and nature, could hardly have found a better setting than this valley beneath the Montsant range. The founding legend gave the place its soul as well as its name. When the first monks arrived, a shepherd is said to have described his vision of angels ascending a heavenly stairway into the clouds at the summit above, and the monks, hearing an invitation in it, made that image the identity of their new home.

By 1218 the community was firmly rooted, and King Jaume I granted it dominion over a cluster of nearby villages: La Morera, Gratallops, Torroja, Porrera, Poboleda, and Vilella Alta. Those names mean something to wine lovers today, because it was the monks of Scala Dei who introduced viticulture to this rugged country, raising their first vines in 1263. The villages under the monastery's care grew into the modern wine region of Priorat, whose steep slate terraces now produce some of Spain's most sought-after reds. There was a fitting rhythm to it all. The order's founder and the monastery's patron, Saint Bruno of Cologne, has his feast day in the first week of October, exactly when the grape harvest begins.

Silence did not mean idleness. A rebuilding campaign begun in the 16th century and carried through the 17th and 18th gave the charterhouse a Baroque and Neoclassical grandeur, and Scala Dei became a genuine artistic center. It nurtured the Escaladei school of painting, whose masters included friar Lluís Pascal and friar Ramón Berenguer, and above all Joaquim Juncosa, who took his vows here in 1660 and became one of the great painters of the Catalan Baroque, filling the monastery with portraits and frescoes since lost. The monks were bookmakers too. One of only two surviving Catalan cookery manuscripts, El llibre de la Cuina de Scala-Dei, was written here in the early 17th century, and the scholar Alonso Tostado had trained as a novice in these walls two centuries earlier.

The end came with brutal speed. In 1835, the government decrees of Mendizábal ordered the seizure of monastic property across Spain, and the monks of Scala Dei were forced to abandon the home their order had kept for over six hundred years. In the wave of anticlerical riots that swept Catalonia that year, mobs burned monasteries one after another, among them Poblet, Sant Cugat, and Scala Dei. Just one day after the monks departed, their charterhouse was sacked, and within days it was set ablaze. What had taken centuries to build was almost entirely destroyed in a matter of two days. The men who had lived in vowed silence here scattered, and their frescoes, their library, and their cloisters went up together.

Even in ruin, the place kept working. In 1843 the surviving buildings were auctioned to five local families, who the following year founded a wine company, Sociedad Agrícola La Unión, carrying the monks' viticultural legacy into a new age. The stones themselves waited longer for care. In 1989 the former owners donated the ruins to the Catalan ministry of Culture, and in the years since the monastery has been partly renovated and opened to visitors. Today you can walk the roofless cloisters and imagine the community that prayed and painted and pressed wine here, while all around, on the terraced hillsides they first planted, the vines of Priorat still climb toward Montsant.