Get Thee To A Nunnery!

No sooner had I finished researching monasteries and nunneries that produce wine for a recent assignment over at Wine Enthusiast, than I started to see stories about them in other places.

Between travel and deadlines, magazines in my life tend to stack up. So I tend to read them all at once. And in every single issue that I recently plowed through from the stack from the last month, I read about an inn or hotel that had once served as a monastery or nunnery. Sometimes more than one was mentioned in the same issue.

I’m not talking about currently-active religious retreats where laypeople can head for a weekend — or longer — of silence and contemplation. I’m referring to buildings that were formerly used by these communities that were converted into inns, hotels and B&Bs all over the world.  Here are a few:

• Carmel Cove Inn sits on the shores of Deep Creek Lake in Swanton, Maryland, and was once a monastery for the Carmelite order.
• Hotel El Convento in San Juan, Puerto Rico, has 58 rooms and dates back to 1646.
• Hotel Santa Clara in Cartagena, Colombia, is even older, as the monastery in its previous life opened in 1621.
• And The Hotel 1555 Malabia House, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, is the first B&B in the city and previously served as a 19th century convent. The bathrooms today were kitchens for the nuns in its earlier incarnation.

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