Kloster Rupertsberg

A medieval Benedictine convent stands on the Rupertsberg hill where the Nahe meets the Rhine. Founded about 1150 by Hildegard of Bingen, it occupied the site of a 10th-century imperial estate run by Count Rupert III. The nuns built a three-aisled church consecrated in 1152 by Archbishop Henry of Mainz. Here Hildegard completed most of her writings, which were copied in the monastery’s scriptorium and spread across Europe. After her death in 1179 the house declined, yet in the late Middle Ages a supposed blood miracle revived its fame beyond her lifetime. The convent was levelled by Swedish troops in 1632 during the Thirty Years War. The surviving nuns fled to Eibingen on the opposite bank, taking Hildegard’s relics and manuscripts with them. Only the church ruin was left standing, but in 1857 the Nahetal railway cut through the hillside and destroyed even that. Today five stone arches are all that remain above ground, rescued from demolition and rebuilt beside a modern villa. Visitors enter the Villa am Rupertsberg to see the five cloister arches set in a glass hall. Information panels trace the site from Roman times through Rupert III to the monastery’s end in 1632. A multimedia lift offers a virtual tour into the vanished cloister. Nearby, the Landeshauptarchiv Koblenz holds many of the convent’s old records. Across the river, the Isenheim Altarpiece by Matthias Grünewald still shows the Rupertsberg church behind the Nativity scene.