Photo Essay: The Cistercian Monastery of Poblet (Catalunya, Spain)

Monestir de Poblet, #20, Catalunya, 2020

The Poblet Monastery

With beginnings way back in the 12th century, this monastery was designated a World Heritage Site in 1991. It is a hidden jewel far from the mayhem of the overly-popular and too-trampled Barcelona tourist sites and well worth your time.

A day trip plan might be to take the train from Barcelona to the very cool medieval walled town of Montblanc (2 hours), then a taxi or bus from there to Poblet (15-25 minutes). By rental car, Montblanc is about an hour from Barcelona with Poblet 15 minutes farther down the road.

If you want to stay overnight, I’d highly recommend the family-operated Fonda dels Àngels for its town center location within the walls of Montblanc, for its cleanliness and fair prices, and–most especially–for its awesome Catalan home cooking.

Another overnight option is to stay right at the Poblet Monastery itself at their Hostatgeria.

If you tire of looking at stones stacked up centuries ago by busy human beans, you can always take off for a hike (or a rock climb) in the hills behind Montblanc and Poblet. This mountainous region is a picturesque natural area–the Reserva Natural del Tillar.

The Photo Essay

You’ll find plenty of line, shape, form, texture, and pattern in these photographs–but I have stolen away the color so you won’t get too distracted from these more essential (IMHO) elements of composition.

All pictures were made with the Nikon D850, hand-held, with the ISO set anywhere from 64 to 3200, depending on the lighting situation, then post-processed through Adobe Elements and the Silver Efex Pro plugin. The lens attached to the camera was what I use for general walk-around purposes–the Nikkor 24-120mm f/4G ED VR–which normally has a bit too much distortion and chromatic aberration for my taste, but in this situation I placed convenience slightly above image quality on the decision scale.