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The Spanish Monastery in Miami

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David Byrne of the Talking Heads once asked the question, “How Did I Get Here?” which might be a fair question for the cloisters of an ancient Spanish monastery that now lies in North Miami Beach. At the St. Bernard de Clairvaux Episcopal Church, you’ll discover the medieval building, first built somewhere between 1133 to 1144 in the 12th Century. How did the oldest building in the western hemisphere, a building over 800 years old, find its way to Florida?

The Monastery of St. Bernard de Clairvaux first found a home in Sacramenia, located in the province of Segovia, Spain. Canonized by a Cistercian monk named Bernard of Clairvaux, the monastery was named after him, and remained the home to Cistercian monks for almost seven hundred years. Then, in the mid-1830s, the cloisters were seized and converted into a granary and stable. Almost a hundred years later, William Randolph Hearst bought the cloisters and the monastery’s out-buildings. These buildings were then taken apart, piece by piece, placed in cushioning hay, packed into about 11,000 crates, and shipped to America. Then hoof and mouth disease broke out in Segovia.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture quarantined the shipment, broke open the crates, and burned the hay as a precaution against the disease, but failed to replace the stones back into the right, numbered boxes. Soon after, Hearst suffered financial problems and the stones sat in a warehouse for over 25 years. The year after Hearst’s death in 1952, the stones were purchased with the intention to use them as a tourist attraction. They were reassembled over a period of 19 months and 1.5 million dollars (in 1950s dollar value), and soon became first a savings and loan building, and then “The Mission of St. John the Divine,” from 1963 to 1964. Soon after, the mission became the Church of St. Bernard de Clairvaux.

One of the last pieces of this long, strange journey, occurred in 1964, when the church was purchased for the Diocese of South Florida, but financial troubles caused them to sell it to a multimillionaire banker and philanthropist who then gave it to the Episcopalian parish of St. Bernard de Clairvaux.

Southern Florida is filled with unique attractions and places to stay, such as the Venetian Pool in Coral Gables, or a boutique Miami hotel in the Art Deco district — but few places have had such a long history as St. Bernard’s Spanish monastery. The cloisters are available for weddings and other special events, or just a general tour from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Mondays through Saturdays, and noon to 4 p.m., on Sundays.

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