TO PRAY AND PRESERVE
Monastery of La Vid
The Monastery of Saint Mary of La Vid dates back to the 12th century when the Premonstratensian community received royal support for the construction of a monastery.
Around the year 1140 Sancho Ansúrez and Domingo Gómez de Campdespina, two Castilian nobles, who had professed in the French abbey of Saint Martin of Laon, returned to Castile where they founded the first two Spanish Premonstratensian abbeys. Sancho Ansúrez, with the help of his powerful family, founded the monastery of Saint Mary of Retuerta and Domingo Gómez de Campdespina the monastery of Saint Mary of Sacral Mount, located on the right bank of the Duero, about two kilometres from the current location of the monastery.
A few years later, in 1152, Alfonso VII confirmed to the Church of Saint Mary of Sacral Mount, to his abbot Domingo and to his successors the ownership of “illo loco qui vocatur Vide”, stating that “ibi sub beati Augustini regulates commorantes abbatiam constituatis”. The construction works of the primitive abbey lasted six or seven years, according to some of the Premonstratensian chronicles that are preserved in the monastery archive. Those articles allow us to suppose that around 1160 the Sacral Mount community had already settled in the new Vitense monastery.
