Montserrat

The Benedictine abbey of Santa Maria de Montserrat clings to a serrated mountain in Catalonia, inland from Barcelona. It enshrines the Virgin of Montserrat, a late twelfth-century Romanesque wooden Madonna and Child known as La Moreneta, the little dark one, one of Europe's Black Madonnas.

Tradition says the image was hidden on the mountain around 718 as Saracen armies invaded; a cult grew around its discovery, and Abbot Oliba of Ripoll founded the monastery in 1025. Ignatius of Loyola laid down his soldier's arms before the statue on 25 March 1522, before founding the Society of Jesus.

The abbey's press printed its first book in 1499. French troops sacked and burned the abbey in 1811 and 1812, and in 1835 it was closed during monastic confiscations, its monks dispersed and buildings left to decay.