Monastery St. Peter

The Convent of St Peter stands in Bludenz, a town in the Austrian Alps of Vorarlberg. Founded in 1286 by Dominican monks, it once housed a school for daughters of noble and later bourgeois families. The present buildings date from the early eighteenth century after earlier structures were destroyed by fire and plague. In 1796 the convent’s steward Ignaz Anton von Indermauer was killed during a peasant revolt inside its walls. During the Second World War the Nazis closed the monastery and turned part of it into a military hospital. The site carries layers of regional history from medieval pilgrimage indulgences to modern restorations. Augustinian nuns first ran the community before handing it to the Dominicans in the fourteenth century. A sixteenth-century plague outbreak killed nearly all the nuns, leaving the convent empty for sixteen years. Later it served as a Tyrolean military hospital and, after 1945, a French military hospital before returning to religious use in 1997. Visitors find a quiet monastery church restored to Catholic worship and eighteenth-century convent buildings arranged around a small courtyard. The church interior features Baroque furnishings added after the fires of the sixteenth century. Original Gothic elements survive in the nave, while later expansions show Rococo decoration added in 1721, 1723 and 1730. The surrounding town of Bludenz offers Alpine views and a short walk leads to the old town centre with its medieval street plan.