MONASTERY OF SANTA MARIA DE RIPOLL
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The center adjacent to this monastery allows us to grasp its cultural and social role over nearly a thousand years of history.
It was the Earl Guifred, said the Velu, who had this monastery erected in the ninth century. Devoted in the year 888, he continued to be enlarged during the three centuries following and became a leading monastic and cultural center during the Upper Middle Ages. His library was at the time one of the most furnished of Christianity. Despite some work here and there, she has today kept the form she had in the twelfth century, remarkable for his novel portal (UNESCO World Heritage Site), also known as the "Stone Bible", with seven fringes giving mainly to see scenes of the Bible, but also for the three neves (there were original ones) five, the other two were destroyed during the earthquakes of 1426 and 1830) in the interior of the cloister. The central nef served as a pantheon in the counties of Cerdagne, Besalú and Barcelona. In 1835, five years after the earthquake, a fire caused the destruction of part of the monastery and valuable archives. Let's mention here the presence of a new interpretation center opened in 2013 in the chapel of the Congregation, adjacent to the monastery, which focuses on a very clear exhibition speech to highlight the importance of the Ripoll monastery in the history of Catalonia, enabling the cultural and social role to be quickly understood of the religious over a thousand years of history. This visit is more than recommended.
