The Oldest European Building in America Predates Columbus By 359 Years
By: Grant Piper
Tags: Society, Architecture, History, Spain, America

The Oldest European Building in America Predates Columbus By 359 Years

Entrance to the cloisters in Miami. ( Rolf Müller / CC BY-SA 3.0)

In the year 1133CE, construction began on a remote hilltop in Castille by King Alfonso VII. At the time, the Reconquista was in full swing and the Christian kings had a policy of erecting Catholic institutions on areas formerly owned or in proximity to Moorish Muslims. The monastery was constructed over a period of many years before blossoming into a military and ideological fortress protecting the interior of Spain from Muslim incursions.

Today, the Monasterio Español de Sacramenia stands on a busy street in Miami, Florida, and is known as the Ancient Spanish Monastery. By most accounts, it is known as the oldest European building in North America.

Saint Augustine, also founded by the Spanish, would not be formally established until 1565, four hundred and thirty two years after Monasterio Español de Sacramenia began its construction back in Spain. Saint Augustine is the oldest continuously inhabited European settlement in the United States. The Monasterio Español de Sacramenia is far older than anything still standing in Saint Augustine today.

So, how did a monastery built in the early years of the 12th century end up thousands of miles away and hundreds of years later in Miami, Florida?

Black market buildings

William Randolph Hearst turn of the century (Public domain)

In 1925, the newspaperman William Randolph Hearst used agents in Spain to illegally purchase many of the buildings that made up the ancient church. Using his vast wealth and connections, Hearst made multiple purchases of old Spanish buildings under the nose of the government. From the 19th century onward, the old empire was faltering and had suffered periods of economic and social upheaval that had left the nation in disarray.

Hearst, a flamboyant tycoon, used the instability to his advantage. He had grand designs for palatial personal residences in the United States made from reconstructed Medieval architecture that he was buying in Europe.

In 1926, Hearst put a series of intricate plans in motion that would see the buildings moved across the planet.

A grand undertaking

After Hearst purchased the nearly eight hundred-year-old building he began a mind-boggling logistical undertaking that would take the monastery from its original place in Spain to New York City. Hearst carefully examined the monastery and made a plan for its deconstruction and reconstruction. Each stone was labeled and carefully taken down, crated, packaged, and numbered for shipment across the Atlantic.

The entire shipment comprised of over 11,000 individual crates containing pieces of the monastery. The stones were packaged in local hay and shipped via ship to New York City where they were to be arranged for transport to California on the American west coast.

Unfortunately, upon arrival in New York, the crates were flagged for quarantine and inspection. Officials opened the crates and examined the contents. Unsurprisingly, the officials were not privy to Hearst’s elaborate numbering scheme that corresponded to his plans to reconstruct an ancient Medieval building on another continent. When the collection was put back together, the plans went out the window and the stones became jumbled.

At the same time, William Randolph Hearst was running into severe financial difficulties. It seems that being a purveyor of yellow journalism and wild flights of fancy eventually leads to financial hardship.

One of the casualties of Hearst’s troubles was the Monasterio Español de Sacramenia whose thousands of crates were unceremoniously placed in storage in Brooklyn.

From a warehouse to a house of worship once more

Inside of the church. (Rolf Müller / CC BY-SA 3.0)

Some of the crates were sold at auction during the period in which the church remained dormant in storage. However, old nondescript stones failed to raise much of an interest and many people did not realize what the collection made up in its entirety.

The church laid in boxes in New York for nearly thirty years until the entire collection was purchased once more in 1954.

Due to the government’s rearranging of the entire collection when it arrived from Spain in the late 1920s, the monastery was called “the world’s largest and most expensive jigsaw puzzle” comprising of over 35,000 individual pieces in over 10,000 remaining boxes.

But the puzzle was completed.

The buyers of the monastery moved the entire crated building to South Florida where they spent 19 months and over a million dollars painstakingly rebuilding it to its former glory on the grounds of an old nursery. Today, the building stands rebuilt on Dixie Highway in North Miami Beach.

In 1964, the building was donated to its current owner — the Episcopal Church of Florida.

Age in Context

The building is currently 888 years old from the start of its construction in Medieval Spain. It took eight years to fully complete and even if we use the date of its final completion it is still 880 years old.

The monastery is 643 years older than the United States, the country in which it currently resides.

It is 359 years older than Columbus’s discovery of North America.

The building is 432 years older than Saint Augustine, the oldest European city in the United States.

It is 388 years older than the oldest Spanish settlement in North America at San Juan, Puerto Rico.

1133 CE was the same year that construction began on the impressive Durham Cathedral in England.

Conclusion

Interestingly enough, this was not the only ancient building Hearst pilfered from Spain. He did the same thing with the Santa Maria de Ovila, another monastery, that he planned on converting into a castle in California. That monastery was rebuilt in the San Francisco area and is fifty years younger than St. Bernard de Clairvaux Church in Miami.

A building far older than everything else on the continent made its way through centuries of warfare in Spain, escaped the clutches of a fanatical tycoon, and was lovingly remade in the United States by industrious entrepreneurs in the 20th century.

The result is a curiosity that defies initial thinking and stands as a reminder of how new European involvement in North America truly is.