16711
West Dixie Highway
North Miami Beach, FL 33160
(305) 945-1461
Fax:
(305) 945-6896
www.spanishmonastery.com
Email:
monastery@earthlink.com
Open:
10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Saturday
1:30
to 5:30 p.m. on Sundays.
Closed:
January 1st, July 4th,
Thanksgiving, December 25th and for three days
during Holy Week.
Admission:
$4.50 for adults, $2.50 for seniors and $1 for
children under 12.
Hidden
in the hubbub of busy downtown North Miami Beach,
lodged behind a shopping center and a tennis center
is one of Miami-Dade County’s gems of an
attraction. Pull into the oak-shaded parking lot and
step into another world.
Officially
the cloister of the Monastery of St. Bernard de
Clairvaux, the building was constructed as the
Monastery of Our Lady, Queen of the Angels, in
Segovia, Spain between 1133 to 1141. After the
canonization of St. Bernard de Clairvaux, it was
renamed in his honor and occupied by Cistercian
monks for nearly seven centuries.
When
Arthur Byne, an agent for newspaper magnate William
Randolph Hearst located it, the monastery’s
cloister was being used for storage and had fallen
into disrepair. In the mid-1920’s Hearst was
buying old edifices for his California castle, San
Simeon, and the cloister and a few other portions of
the monastery were available and appealed to him.
Hearst
sent experts to diagram the cloister, dismantle it
and ship it to the United States. Every stone, every font and
fountain and every statue were disassembled,
numbered, carefully packed in straw and fitted into
individually made crates with numbers corresponding
the numbers on the stones. But a hoof-and-mouth
disease scare in the U.S. resulted in each of the
crates being opened, the stones washed, and the straw
removed and burned since it could have been
contaminated by the bacteria that caused the
disease. The stones were then haphazardly returned
to the boxes, which were shipped off to a warehouse
in Brooklyn. The stock market crashed and the
mix-and-match monastery was forgotten in the
confusion and uncertainty that followed.
In
the mid-1950s, following Hearst’s death, his
possessions and properties were being sold off and
the monastery cloister was among the holdings placed
up for sale. Two South Floridians, Raymond Moss and
William Edgemon, bought the monastery and shipped
the boxes to a small nursery site in northern
Miami-Dade County where it took several years to
sort out the pieces and re-assemble the cloister.
The
Ancient Spanish Monastery has never been promoted as
aggressively as many of South Florida’s other
tourist attractions, but it remains a place of
historical interest as well as one of beauty. The
formal garden, with its hedges of ixora and Suriman
cherry and dozens of beautiful plant species, from
delicate orchids and milk and honey lillies to
thorny bougainvillea and sausage trees are a perfect
spot for solitude and reflection. In addition to its
value as an attraction, the monastery is a favorite
spot for formal weddings.
The
6-acre Ancient Spanish Monastery is listed in the
National Register of Historical Places and the
Florida List of Historical Sites.
