The Monastery of Santa Maria de Aguas Vivas traces its roots to the 13th century, set in the countryside of the municipality of Carcaixent in the province of Valencia. It belonged to the Augustinian order, and for centuries the monks were the guardians of the image of the Virgin of Aguas Vivas, the patron saint of Carcaixent. To hold the town's patroness was to hold something the whole community cared about, a role that gave a remote rural monastery a place in the life of the people beyond its walls.

The monumental building visible today took shape across the 16th and 17th centuries in Gothic and Baroque styles, with the north wing completed only in the 18th. The Valencian architect Francisco Colom led an expansion in 1597, reworking the cloister, and further campaigns followed in 1633 and 1695. The whole complex is organized around that cloister, with the church to the south, the farm buildings to the north, and a tall rectangular body of five floors rising to dominate the rest, facing the old road that runs from Alzira toward Tavernes de la Valldigna. It is a building that grew by addition, each century leaving its layer on the one before.

The cloister is small but richly proportioned, decorated with frescoes and centered on its cistern, the refectory and kitchen set alongside. The bell tower rises as a long vertical shaft fitted with a sundial, capped in Arabic tiles and topped by an iron weathervane. Over the semicircular church door hangs a ceramic panel of Nuestra Senora de Aguas Vivas, the living-waters Virgin who gave the house its name. Inside, a single nave opens onto an altar and six side chapels, and the high choir keeps stalls from two eras, some Gothic work of the 15th century, some later Plateresque, standing side by side like a record of changing taste.

The monastic life ended in the middle of the 19th century with the Ecclesiastical Confiscations of Mendizabal, the state sales that emptied religious houses across Spain to pay public debts. The monks left, and the building passed to the barons of Casanova, who put it to use as rural housing. In 1977 the Carcaixent photographer and entrepreneur Antonio Vidal Bellver bought and restored it, turning the old monastery into a hotel residence. It later passed to a hospitality businessman from Gandia, and in 2023 a private investor bought the property from bankruptcy proceedings, closing the deal before the regional government could complete its own long-negotiated purchase. Somewhere in that long reinvention the presbytery's old sacristy was converted into a winery, sacred storage giving way to barrels, one more chapter in the life of a building that has never stopped finding new reasons to stand.

Look closely and the building still wears its history on its surfaces. A noble family's coat of arms is carved above one of the cloister doorways, a mark of the patrons who once mattered here, and high on the dominant five-story block a painted panel carries the date 1767 beside an image of the living-waters Virgin. Protected today as a Bien de Interes Cultural, one of the heritage landmarks of the province of Valencia, the old monastery endures in its quiet countryside, neither wholly a ruin nor quite the working religious house it began as. Its long survival is an argument in stone: that a place can outlive its original purpose many times over and still be worth keeping, so long as someone finds a reason to open its doors. The monks who first raised it would scarcely recognize what it became, and yet its walls, its tower, and its cloister remain unmistakably theirs.