For most of Argentina's history, a man who felt called to the most demanding contemplative life in the Catholic Church had to leave the country to live it. The Carthusian Order, founded in the French Alps in 1084, kept no house anywhere in the Spanish-speaking Americas. Argentine vocations had to emigrate. In 1997 that changed: the order's General Chapter and the Argentine Conference of Catholic Bishops backed a plan to found a charterhouse at last. Four monks were dispatched from the Grande Chartreuse - the order's mother house in the Alps - to find the right ground. They chose a secluded place called the Campo de la Trinidad, far enough from everything that silence could settle over it.

The Argentine architect Federico Shanahan designed the monastery for a single purpose: to make solitude possible. A Carthusian charterhouse is not one building but many - a ring of individual hermitages, or cells, each really a small house with its own garden, arranged around a great cloister. San José holds twenty-two such cells, along with chapels, a refectory where the monks eat together only on Sundays and feast days, a chapter house, and a guesthouse. A first fragment of the hermitage opened on 15 October 1998. The whole complex was completed and its church consecrated on 19 March 2004 - Saint Joseph's Day, the feast of the carpenter saint to whom the monastery is dedicated.

Carthusian life is built around three exits from the cell each day, and almost nothing else. The monks gather in the dark for the long night office, again for morning Mass, and once more for afternoon vespers; the rest of their hours pass alone in prayer, study, and manual work. Much of the chanting happens by the light of a few shaded oil lamps, the choir books pooled in small circles of glow. The order's own motto for this life is plain: union with God. As the Carthusians like to say of themselves, they have never been reformed because they were never deformed - the rhythm has barely changed in nearly a thousand years.

Almost no one sees inside. The Carthusians take no tourists and grant few interviews, which is exactly why the rare openings have drawn attention far beyond the order. The Buenos Aires newspaper Clarín titled its 2006 report A Solas con Dios - Alone with God. The photographer Eduardo Longoni was allowed to document the monks for an exhibition he called Luz y misterio: el secreto de los monjes, light and mystery, the secret of the monks. Both titles point at the same thing: a community that has chosen to disappear into prayer, in plain sight, in the hills of Córdoba.

From the outside the charterhouse reads almost as landscape - low walls and red roofs folded into the scrub and stone of the Sierras, deliberately hard to find and easy to miss. There is no spectacle to it, no soaring cathedral on a peak. The point of the place is precisely that there is nothing to see, only something happening: more than a dozen men keeping a vigil of silence that began before any nation existed here, and that they intend to keep for the rest of their lives.