- Abbey of Santa María de Alaón
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The Abbey of Santa María de Alaón (Spanish: Monasterio de Santa María de Alaón, Catalan: Monestir de Santa Maria d'Alaó) is a former Benedictine abbey, earlier a Cluniac priory, in Sopeira near Ribagorza, in the province of Huesca, Aragon, Spain, established in the late 11th or early 12th century and built in the 12th. The monastery architecture is Lombard Romanesque.[1]
Monastic life continued until the Ecclesiastical Confiscations of Mendizábal in 1836, when the monastery was abandoned. During the Spanish Civil War a fire destroyed part of the monastic buildings and its remaining contents. The church has since been restored, along with such other structures as survive.
The groundplan is that of a basilica with three aisles and semi-cylindrical apses with blind arcades and a square bell tower of four storeys. The main doorway has voussoirs, a pointed arch and archivolts, above which is a chrismon of the Trinity. The monastery formerly had a cloister, of which now only the bases of a few columns remain.
The abbey cartulary (cartulario de Alaón) is preserved in the Real Academia de la Historia in Madrid, under Est. 35, grada 4.a, no. 67. It was compiled in the second half of the 12th century (perhaps copied largely from a late 11th-century cartulary), its latest document dating from 1121, though documents of the thirteenth century were added at some point.
It is of especial note because in the blank pages at some time in the 15th century an anonymous writer, presumably a monk of the abbey, inserted a brief chronicle of events in the County of Ribagorza in the 11th/12th centuries, the Fragmentum historicum ex cartulario Alaonis. It is not clear when the chronicle was composed.
References
Coordinates: 42°19′05.34″N 0°44′59″E / 42.31815°N 0.74972°E
Categories:- Monasteries in Aragon
- Benedictine monasteries in Spain
- 12th-century architecture
- Romanesque architecture in Spain
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