The Monastery of St. Bernard de Clairvaux was built in the Segovia province of Spain in the 12th century. Cistercian monks occupied the monastery for nearly 700 years. In the mid 1830s it was seized, sold, and converted into a granary. In 1925 William Randolph Hearst purchased the monastery and its outbuildings. The structures were dismantled stone by stone, bound with protective hay, packed in some 11,000 wooden crates, numbered for identification and shipped to the United States. About that time, hoof and mouth disease had broken out in Segovia, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, fearing possible contagion, quarantined the shipment upon its arrival, broke open the crates and burned the hay, a possible carrier of the disease. Unfortunately, the workmen failed to replace the stones in the same numbered boxes before moving them to a warehouse. Soon after the shipment arrived, Hearst's financial problems forced most of his collection to be sold at auction. The stones remained in a warehouse in Brooklyn, New York, for 26 years. In 1952, they were purchased for use as a tourist attraction in South Florida. It took 19 months and almost $1.5 million dollars to put the monastery back together. Some of the unmatched stones still remain in the back lot; others were used in the construction of the present Church's Parish Hall.

Today, the Spanish Monastery is a popular site for weddings and wedding portraiture.

http://www.spanishmonastery.com/default.asp