I did waymarking, geocaching and benchmarking while attending the largest book fair in the United States--the 24th Annual Miami Book Fair International--at Miami Dade Community College (MDCC), Wolfson Campus in November 2007. I rode the bus from my South Beach hotel to the closest bus stop and walked several blocks to the Old Spanish Monastery.The Old Spanish Monastery; Also known as Monastery of St. Bernard of Clairvaux; Cistercian Monastery is located at 16711 W. Dixie Hwy. Architect, builder, or engineer: Atwater, Montgomery, Carswell, Allan. Architectural Style: Romanesque.
William Randolph Hearst purchased the Spanish Monastery in 1925 and had it shipped to the United States. It eventually ended up in South Florida. Twenty-three men spent 90 days opening the boxes. They sorted the more than 35,000 stones in the "greatest jigsaw puzzle in history." The stones were spread over the entire 20-acre site.
Seven months after work started, the first two walls of the cloister walk began to take shape. Numbers had been marked on each stone before the Monastery was dismantled in Spain. The stones had to be fitted into their proper places like the pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle. Some weighted more than 1 1/2 tons.
One year after the work had began, the Monastery was nearly half completed but thousands of stones still remained to be fitted in place. It took 19 months to put the Monastery back together. Some stones still remain in the back lot; others were used in the construction of the present Church's Parish Hall.