Reichenstein Monastery

Reichenstein stands on a wooded hill above the Rur valley, near the small town of Monschau in the Eifel. The site was once a 11th-century hilltop fortress before the Prämonstratenser order built a monastery there in the 12th century. After the French secularisation the buildings passed through private hands until 2008, when French Benedictines from Notre-Dame de Bellaigue took over. The monastery now belongs to the traditionalist Priestly Fraternity of St Pius X and is one of the few new Benedictine houses in Germany.

The monastery’s history is marked by figures such as Prior Stephan Horrichem, known as the ‘Apostle of the Venn’, who rebuilt the priory in 1687 and saw the church rededicated in 1693. The ensemble includes the old priory, the 13th-century chapel with its 1980 slate roof, and a 19th-century courtyard of slate-roofed wings. Traces of round arches and external buttresses suggest parts of the chapel may date from the early Middle Ages, up to four centuries earlier than once thought.

Visitors walk past the former priory and the chapel’s 3/8 apse, then round the cobbled Wirtschaftshof. The chapel’s slate roof and plain stone walls sit beside later wings with their own slate roofs. Beyond the buildings the Rur valley opens into a protected landscape of cliffs and meadows. The monastery church, once used as a barn, now serves its original purpose again after its 2009 consecration.