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History
Santa Maria de Valldonzella is a monastery of nuns of the Cistercian Order. The Cistercians arose in 1098, as a branch of the Benedictines, in the monastery of Cîteaux or Cistercian (Burgundy, France), in order to live according to the Rule of St. Benedict in all its purity. Soon, especially because of the strong spiritual personality of St. Bernard (1090-1153), abbot of Claravall, great mystic, preacher of great prestige and author of many works of monastic spirituality and theology, the Cistercians (called white monks) proliferated everywhere. 'Europe.
Valldonzella has been, through the centuries, an itinerant community, because a series of circumstances have meant that the nuns had to move several times from one place to another.
After some preludes, obscure as all the beginnings, the community was constituted in Santa Creu d'Olorde (near Vallvidrera) on November 4, 1237, by the donation made by the bishop of Barcelona of the church of the Holy Cross of Olorde to a community of nuns who followed the Rule of St. Benedict. Already formed the Cistercian community, in 1259, the war conflicts of King James I with the Catalan nobles forced the nuns to take refuge in Barcelona and, when they could return to the monastery, Bishop Arnau de Gurb, to live longer protected, he did not want them to live in a depopulated area anymore.


A new monastery near the Covered Cross was then built outside the city walls, thanks to the help of the faithful to whom the bishop granted indulgences if they helped the community. The situation of the monastery and the monastic observance of the community meant that, in the 14th century, kings and the court, when entering or leaving Barcelona, often stayed in Valldonzella. It was even in Valldonzella where in 1410, King Martí l'Humà died. In the 17th century, this monastery was destroyed in the Reapers' War.
In the 17th century, the nuns went to live in the Priory of Nazareth, in the interior of the city, near the portal of Saint Anthony of the wall. This other monastery was burned during the Tragic Week of 1909 and the nuns were charitably welcomed by the Manuel Valls i Martí family in the Torre dels Pardals, in La Sagrera.
After this event, the abbess Esperança Roca i Roca, advised by the spiritual director of the community, the future bishop Torras i Bages, undertook the construction of the new monastery, the current one. In 1913, the community was able to inhabit the new monastery, although the church could not be finished and consecrated until 1922.
The current building is the work of the architect Bernardí Martorell i Puig, in the most modern style of the time, currently called "Catalan modernism". It is a style reminiscent of medieval art. It appears in the era of Romanticism, in the second half of the nineteenth century, and has its greatest splendor in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
This is evident from many of its elements and especially the church, built, like the rest of the monastery, with exposed bricks, which gives the outside a certain Mudejar air, as in some other manifestations of the time of modernism, which applied a wide variety of resources.
The church is of general Gothic but imaginative intention (for example: in the stained glass windows and the interesting ornamental reinforcements of the transept arches) and has a perfectly Gothic structure and mechanics (just look at the transept and the central nave) . Overall, it has great architectural and decorative strength.
On the southwest side of the monastery stretched a large orchard of more than 2,000 m2, currently reduced by half with the rehabilitation works of a sports and recreational facility for children of the DGAIA.