VALLBONA

Vallbona, the third great royal abbey of Cataluña, is situated in the province of Lerida, but on the borders of Tarragona, in a singularly wild and remote district. Like Poblet, it is named after a hermit who in the year 1157 founded here and at Colobres, monasteries for both sexes. Twenty years later, both houses were formed into a single community of Cistercian nuns, under the headship of Doña Oria de Ramiro. The pious Anglesola of Vallbona is buried before the high altar in the company of James the Conqueror. The church is gloomy, silent and severe. It is entered through a Romanesque porch in the north transept, the west front presenting an unbroken wall. Vallbona has also a noble cloister, with a fine gallery in the Pointed style; on the north and the remaining galleries in the Romanesque. In Piferrer’s time, pictures and monuments relieved the excessive severity of the royal nunnery of Aragon, but now there reigns a desolation and poverty which might have affrighted even the hermit founder.