Santa Maria de Ovila Monastery / New Clairvaux - Vina CA
N 39° 56.237 W 122° 03.163
10S E 580934 N 4421225
This special building was first erected in Spain and later moved to Vina, CA.
Waymark Code: WMJPJR
Location: California, United States
Date Posted: 12/13/2013
Views: 2
The following information is taken from the interpretive display near this beautiful, relocated building:
"In the late 12th Century, Cistercian monks built the Santa Maria de Ovila monastery over a thirty-year period near Madrid, Spain. It was intended as a permanent establishment in a chain of outposts that would help settle and maintain territory re-conquered from the Moors. For political reason the Spanish government of Maria Cristina passed a law in 1835 banning small monesteries and seized their property The Ovila monastery was sold to a wealthy family, who used the buildings for farm storage. In 1931, after monestery buildings had fallen into disrepaire, publishing giant William Randolf Hearst purchased and dismantled parts of the monastery, including the Chapter House. Heart took great effors to mark the stones with a re-assembly code. Using eleven freighters, he shipped the magnificent Sacred Stones to California with plans to incorporate them into his vacation home near Mt. Shasta. The Great Depressin forced Hearst to abandon the plan to tse the stones within his home on the McCloud River. Instead, he granted them to the City of San Francisco with the understanding that the monastery buildings would be reconstructed as a museum in Golden Gate Park. Famed architect Julia Morgan laid out several possible plans for the museum, but World War II, a lack of funding, and a series of fires that destroyed the re-assembly instructions from the majority of the stones prevented this idea from being carried out. In 1955, Father Thomas X Davis arrived in San Francisco to begin his assignment at a new monastery in Vina. He and other members of his traveling group took a detour to Golden Gate Park to view the Sacred Stones that had languished there for decades. Father Thomas resolved to bring the stones home to Cistecian soil and "right the wrong" committed against the original buildings."
A grant from the Hearst Foundation enabled the stones to be be re-constructed into the current building.
More information and current status can be found at this website:
www.newclairvaux.-houseorg/chapter-reconstruction.html
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visit link)