Qualla: Santes Creus https://qualla.com/santes-creus en-us © 2026 Bendyline Thu, 20 Aug 2026 16:39:03 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/s/p/2/g/santes-creus-wk/hero-small.webp Qualla: Santes Creus https://qualla.com/santes-creus Santes Creus: Introduction https://qualla.com/santes-creus/ Photo credit Josep Renalias, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Cistercian monks who built Santes Creus owned almost nothing. They slept on straw mattresses laid on the floor of a bare stone hall, kept their church free of ornament, and grew their own food in a quiet valley of the Gaia river. Yet buried in the middle of all that austerity lies a king who conquered a Mediterranean kingdom. Peter III of Aragon, called Peter the Great, who seized the crown of Sicily, chose these humble monks as his eternal company, and his stone coffin rests on a slab of purple Roman porphyry. Santes Creus is where two opposite ideas of glory meet.

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Image: Josep Renalias | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/p/2/g/santes-creus-wk/sp2g-santes-creus-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Santes Creus: An Order That Fled the World https://qualla.com/santes-creus/ Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. The monastery was founded in 1168 by monks of the Cistercian order, reformers who believed the church had grown too comfortable and set out to build lives of deliberate hardship. Their creed shows in the architecture. The church, begun in 1174 and finished around 1225, follows a ...

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Image: CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/p/2/g/santes-creus-wk/sp2g-santes-creus-an-order-that-fled-the-world.mp3 0:06 2 full Santes Creus: The Kings Who Came to the Quiet https://qualla.com/santes-creus/ Photo credit MARIA ROSA FERRE ✿, CC BY-SA 2.0. For all their retreat from the world, the Cistercians drew the powerful to them. The kings of the Crown of Aragon made Santes Creus a royal pantheon, and the first to be laid here was Peter III, called the Great. He had won Sicily and defied a pope who excommunicated him for it; ...

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Image: MARIA ROSA FERRE ✿ | CC BY-SA 2.0

]]> Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/p/2/g/santes-creus-wk/sp2g-santes-creus-the-kings-who-came-to-the-quiet.mp3 0:06 3 full Santes Creus: The Admiral at the King's Feet https://qualla.com/santes-creus/ Photo credit Misburg3014, CC BY-SA 3.0. One more grave belongs to a man who spent his life at sea. Roger de Lluria, the admiral who commanded the fleets of the Crown of Aragon and was reputed never to have lost a naval battle, lies buried at the feet of the king he served. It is a medieval arrangement full of meaning, ...

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Image: Misburg3014 | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/p/2/g/santes-creus-wk/sp2g-santes-creus-the-admiral-at-the-kings-feet.mp3 0:06 4 full Santes Creus: Stone That Learned to Bloom https://qualla.com/santes-creus/ Photo credit Lancastermerrin88, CC BY-SA 4.0. The monastery did not stay entirely austere. When King James II ordered the old cloister torn down and rebuilt, the master mason Reynard of Fonoll, and after him his pupil Guillem de Seguer, carved a Gothic masterpiece that broke the Cistercian rule against decoration. The window...

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]]> Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/p/2/g/santes-creus-wk/sp2g-santes-creus-stone-that-learned-to-bloom.mp3 0:06 5 full