The land was a gift. In the twelfth century Count Ramon Berenguer IV granted it to the Cistercian order, and the monks who came to Santa Maria de Poblet did what their rule demanded: they worked. They cleared and managed the surrounding woodland with unusual care for their age, raising farms and drawing a living from the forest without stripping it bare. That stewardship lasted nearly seven hundred years, until the monastic domain was broken up in 1835. What the monks left behind was not only a monastery but a forest shaped by centuries of patient hands, which is much of the reason so much of it survives intact today.

At the heart of the park stands the monastery itself, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of the great Cistercian houses of Europe. Visitors pass through fortified gates, for Poblet was built to defend as well as to pray, into cloisters where Romanesque solidity gives way to Gothic grace. The Church of Santa Maria holds a rose window, a soaring alabaster altarpiece carved by Damià Forment, and, most remarkably, the royal tombs of the Crown of Aragon: kings and queens laid to rest in a forest church, their tombs raised on stone arches near the high altar. Beyond lie the chapter house where monks once met and the long dormitory where they slept, plain rooms that still speak of a life stripped to its essentials.

Step out of the cloister and the park becomes a story about water and trees. These slopes gather the headwaters of the Francolí River and feed roughly a hundred springs, many of them ferruginous, their water faintly metallic with iron. The forest they nourish is exceptional: Poblet holds the largest holm-oak reserve in the country and the only community of Pyrenean oak in all of Catalonia, along with protected stands of yew and holly. It was declared a natural site of national interest in 1984, and later reserves were drawn around the ravines of Trinitat and Tillar to guard the wildest corners. This is, by common agreement, some of the best-kept woodland in the Tarragona region.

The land tilts steeply. From lowlands around 400 meters, the park climbs to 1,201 meters at the Tossal de la Baltasana, the highest peak of the Prades Mountains. Because the slopes face north, they lie in a kind of permanent shadow that cools and dampens the Mediterranean climate, giving Poblet a greener, more mountainous character than the sun-baked country below. Wild boar are everywhere, an isolated population of tiny shrews clings on as a living curiosity, and more than ninety bird species move through the trees and cliffs: goshawks threading between trunks at speed, peregrine falcons and ravens riding the updrafts along the bluffs. In summer the woods run dry and fire is a constant worry; in winter, sudden fog can swallow the high trails.

People have crossed these hills on foot for centuries, and still do. Poblet is one link in the Ruta del Cister, the trail that binds three great Cistercian houses, Poblet, Santes Creus, and the convent of Vallbona de les Monges, and it also marks a stage on the Catalan Way of St. James. The GR175 threads through the park, past picnic clearings and up to viewpoints with names like the Tossal de la Creu. Nearby, the village of Rojals shelters prehistoric paintings that belong to UNESCO's Rock Art of the Iberian Mediterranean Basin. Pilgrim or hiker, monk or king, this forest has always drawn people willing to walk into it.