The convent was founded in 1431 by Violante of Aragon, daughter of Alfonso of Aragon and Foix, the royal Duke of Gandía. She gave it to the Colettine Poor Clares, a reformed and especially strict branch of the enclosed Franciscan order, and set it in the heart of the town, a few steps from the great Collegiate Basilica of Gandia. Its Gothic church holds an altarpiece by the Italian master Paolo da San Leocadio, the painter who helped carry the Renaissance into Valencia. After Violante died, the house fell nearly empty for a time, before a Valencian noble, Luis Vich y de Corbera, took it upon himself to restore it and bring the cloister back to life.

To refill the silent cloister, ten nuns traveled all the way from a convent in the French town of Lézignan-Corbières, carrying their community's way of life across the mountains. Among them was one remembered as María Escarlata, said to be the sister of a French prince, who had fled to Gandia to escape a marriage forced upon her. Her story hints at what these walls could mean. For some women the convent was a genuine calling; for others it was sanctuary — the one place where a woman of rank might refuse the future her family had arranged for her, and be left, at last, in peace behind a grille no one could cross.

It was the Borgia family, above all, that filled Santa Clara. María Enríquez de Luna, Duchess of Gandia, set aside her title to enter as Sister Gabriela; the community chose her as abbess in 1530, and she died nine years later. Her daughter, Sister Francisca de Jesús, became abbess in her turn in 1533 and led the house until 1548. Francisca lived to witness something extraordinary — her own mother in the same cloister, and alongside them five of her nieces, the sisters of Saint Francis Borgia, the Duke of Gandía who surrendered his dukedom to become a Jesuit and was later canonized. In the courtyard grows an ancient olive tree that tradition says the saint planted with his own hands, a living thread binding him to the women of his family who prayed here. Between them, mother and daughter turned a modest Valencian convent into a Borgia household of a wholly different kind from the one the world was watching in Rome.

For all its austerity, the convent became a strongbox of art. The Borgias left it an extraordinary collection — paintings from the hands or workshops of José de Ribera, Juan de Juanes, Paolo da San Leocadio, Francisco Salzillo, and Francisco Ribalta, cherished behind the enclosure for more than five hundred years. The nuns also keep a venerated image known as the Virgin of Baluarte, the Virgin of the Bastion. In 2010 the community agreed to lend works to the town for a future Museum of the Poor Clares, in the old Sant Marc Hospital, finally letting the world glimpse what it had guarded so long. Yet Santa Clara remains a working, enclosed convent. Only the Valencian Gothic church can be entered — a single lit doorway into a world that has kept its own counsel since 1431. What lies beyond it — the paintings, the relics, the memory of the women who chose these walls — is a reminder that not every Borgia story ends in a palace or a papal court. Some end, quietly, in prayer.