The community began as something looser than an abbey. In its earliest form, documented from 1157, it was a settlement of hermits of both sexes gathered around a founder named Ramon de Vallbona, living by the Rule of Saint Benedict in the hills of Urgell. It might easily have faded. By 1175 only a small group of nuns remained, and they made a decisive choice: to affiliate themselves with the Cistercian Order and continue as a female house. The following year their first abbess, Oria Ramirez, arrived from Tulebras Abbey in distant Navarre to lead them. A gift of land in 1163 from Ramon Berenguer IV, count of Barcelona, had already given the fragile community roots. What survived was a monastery run by women, and it would endure for centuries.

A small nunnery in the hills needed powerful friends, and Vallbona found them. King Alfonso II of Aragon and his queen, Sancha of Castile, granted it privileges, and noble families across the region poured in gifts that let it grow. From Rome came something even more valuable than money: Pope Innocent III extended papal immunity and protection around 1200, and a bull of 1201 regulated the enclosure and guaranteed the abbey's independence from the local bishop, letting the women govern their own affairs. For a house of women in the Middle Ages, this pairing of self-rule with powerful patronage was a rare and durable foundation. King James I of Aragon stayed here repeatedly and personally sponsored the construction. This layering of royal and papal favor is written into the buildings, including a church whose architecture marks the very transition from Romanesque to Gothic. In 1931 it was declared a national monument.

Vallbona keeps its dead close, and many of them are women. In the southern aisle lies the tomb of Ferrer Alamany de Toralla, who died in 1360, and his wife Beatriz de Guimera; he is carved on the lid as a gentleman bearing his heraldry, while she appears on one side in the Cistercian habit she wore in life, and beneath them two angels lift a soul toward heaven. The northern wall holds five sarcophagi; on two the names can still be read, Sibil-la de Guimera and Miquela Sasala, the latter dated 1244. The chapter hall, entered through a Gothic gate built under the abbess Anglesola in the 14th century, is paved with the tomb slabs of abbesses, and the western cloister carries the heraldry of the Caldes family, who supplied the monastery's leaders in that age. Here, unusually for a medieval institution, it is women whose names and faces are set permanently into the stone.

Vallbona does not stand alone. Together with the great monasteries of Poblet and Santes Creus, it forms the Cistercian Route across this corner of Catalonia, three houses that shaped the region's faith, land, and art. Its treasures reward a close eye. In the chapel of Corpus Christi stands an image of the Virgin Mary in polychrome stone by Guillem Seguer, and from that same altar two 14th-century antependia now hang in the National Art Museum of Catalonia. In the chapter hall, an alabaster Virgin of Mercy is attributed to the sculptor Pere Johan. The main portal, facing the abbey square, gathers five archivolts around a tympanum of the Virgin and Child ringed by angels, a doorway that has welcomed pilgrims for the better part of a thousand years.