Saturday 20 May 2023

Recycling a medieval Spanish Cistercian monastery


The website of El País has an account of how that indefatigable purchaser and dismantler of historic buildings in pursuit of his megalomaniac building schemes, William Randolph Hearst, acquired and removed to California a substantial part of a medieval monastery from the area south of Madrid - and then abandoned the material in storage in San Francisco. Two and more generations later the remains were transferred to a modern Californian Cistercian house and finally re-erected as part of that monastery. So I suppose the story has a sort of happy ending, but I do think it would have been better if Hearst and his ilk had not bought up and relocated such buildings.



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