Mariastern Abbey, Hohenweiler

Abtei Mariastern stands on a hill above the village of Hohenweiler in Vorarlberg, surrounded by the foothills of the Pfänder range ten kilometres north of Bregenz. It is a Cistercian nunnery belonging to the Mehrerau Congregation and dedicated to the Virgin Mary under the title Star of the Sea. The site includes the former Schloss Gwiggen, a sixteenth- and seventeenth-century building with a Loreto chapel.

The abbey’s history begins with three dissolved Cistercian convents in the Swiss canton of Thurgau—Kalchrain, Feldbach and Tänikon—closed by liberal reforms in the 1830s and finally suppressed in 1848. In 1856 Prioress Ida Schäli and Abbess Augustina Fröhlich bought Schloss Gwiggen and gradually restored monastic life with help from exiled Zisterziensers from Wettingen. The reunited communities moved in between 1861 and 1864, and the buildings were enlarged in the late nineteenth century to form a quadrangle modelled on medieval Cistercian plans.

Visitors enter through the old castle gate into the abbey offices and guest rooms. A long northern wing contains cells and the refectory, while the late-nineteenth-century chapter house and church of 1896 stand to the east and north. A cloister links these wings around a courtyard with a fountain and the sisters’ cemetery. The 1987 south and west ranges added further cells, a library, workshops and guest quarters, completing the enclosure. The Loreto chapel, once a local pilgrimage site, now houses a Fatima statue in the church, and the abbey has founded a daughter house at Marienfeld in Lower Austria.