Kloster Löwental

Löwental is a former Dominican convent on the edge of Friedrichshafen by the Bodensee. Founded in 1250 by Johannes von Ravensburg, it once stood beside the Rotach stream. The nuns farmed two hundred hectares of fields and five hundred hectares of woodland. A mill ground the harvest, and an apothecary added to the community’s income. After fires and war the buildings were rebuilt, finally in baroque style with a church consecrated in 1687. The convent’s story is marked by change. In 1695 it owned sixty-four farms, yet repeated fires and the Thirty Years War left it ruined. After secularisation in 1806 the state took its lands and the nuns left. The church furnishings were sold and the complex became a barracks, then a ruin. Today only fragments remain: part of the cloister wall, the Trautenmühle and the Gasthaus ‘Zum Klosterwirt’. Visitors walk past the low red-brick remains of the convent wall. A short way off stands the Gothic tower and choir of St Petrus und Paulus in Ettenkirch, its ceiling painting of the Coronation of Mary still bright. Nearby, the little St Blasius chapel keeps its baroque altars and wartime scars. The quiet lanes and the old mill wheel recall the nuns’ daily life beside the stream.