Silence used to be an ordinary Tuesday. In a few hundred buildings, it still is.
We keep being sold the same holiday, dressed four different ways.
Picture the brochure. A wooden lodge with nothing on the walls. A lockbox by the door where your phone spends the week. A facilitator with a very calm voice. Sound bath at four, silent supper at seven, and a price that would cover a fortnight in Italy with the flights thrown in.
Silence is a product now. There are market reports about it. Somebody is forecasting the growth rate of not looking at your phone.
And a few valleys over, there is a building with a bell tower where they have been doing exactly this since the sixth century.
No lockbox — nobody mentions your phone at all. No facilitator. Nobody will ask you to journal about your relationship with attention. There is a room with a bed, a desk and a window. A bell that goes at hours you would describe as unreasonable. Dinner at a long table. And a rule written around the year 516 that says any guest who turns up is to be received as if he were Christ himself — which is a higher standard of welcome than most hotels are aiming for.
Fifty euros a night, dinner included, in a lot of places.
And it lands about as right as anything could just now. We spend the whole day inside a machine that pings — work, news, weather somewhere else, everybody's opinion of everything, all of it arriving whether anyone asked for it or not. What used to be an ordinary Tuesday is sold back to us by the week, with a facilitator. A table, a walk, a bell, a room where nothing is trying to reach you. Everybody needs that. This is the grown-up version, and it comes with dinner.
This page is Europe. The temples and the shukubo of Asia are a subject of their own.
A guest room in a working religious community, rented to whoever asks.
It isn't charity and it isn't a retreat you've been accepted onto. Hospitality is written into the rule these communities live by — receiving strangers is part of the job, not a sideline — and the guest wing is also how a great many of them keep the roof on. You are useful to them. That's a much more comfortable footing than being a supplicant.
Nobody checks what you believe. A Benedictine at Leyre in Spain put it about as plainly as it can be put: we don't ask who they are, what they do, what they like, or even if they believe.
What you are agreeing to is the community's day, not its faith. Meals at fixed times. Quiet after a certain hour. Doors that lock at night, because the people who live there get up before you do.
Italy has the deepest supply by a distance. Convents and monasteries in Rome, Florence, Venice, Assisi, Tuscany, the Amalfi coast and Sicily — several hundred of them taking ordinary travellers, many with private bathrooms and breakfast, most a short walk from the thing everyone else queues to see. The Italian church has its own directory, and there are two booking sites that specialise in nothing else.
Spain does two versions at once. The hospedería — a proper guest house attached to the monastery, open to anyone — and the inner one, a handful of rooms inside the enclosure where you eat with the community in silence. At Leyre in Navarra the inner one is ten rooms, three to ten nights, full board, no lift and no wifi. Huerta, Silos, Poblet and Montserrat all run their own versions.
France runs on a participation aux frais — you're told roughly what a day costs and you pay it. At Notre-Dame des Neiges in the Ardèche the guideline is around fifty euros a day with all meals, less if you're a student or it's a hard year, and everyone lays a table or dries a dish at some point in the day. France also has the island — Lérins, twenty minutes by boat from Cannes, where twenty-five Cistercians farm eight hectares of vineyard, run the only ferry to their own island, and keep a guest wing for anyone who wants the silence.
Austria and southern Germany have the abbeys with the baroque libraries, and most of them have a guest house. Two Austrian directories will show you which. Germany also has Hildegard of Bingen's own abbey, still running above the Rhine, at €85 a night with every meal.
Ireland and Britain keep a small, excellent list. Glenstal in Limerick has twelve en-suite rooms in the monastery itself, supper in the refectory with the monks, and, out in the woods a kilometre away, self-catering cabins with a wood stove for anyone who wants the silence without the timetable.
Greece has Meteora and the mountain. Mount Athos is a rule of its own: men only, a permit, a strict daily quota, and monasteries that put you up and feed you for nothing. More on that further down, because it is the one with real conditions attached.
The Nordics are quieter and mostly Lutheran now, but they are there — a handful of Swedish communities take guests by the night, with breakfast and a pay-what-you-can price, and the Swedish church keeps a public list of every one of them.
And the Camino, which is the back door into all of it. Several monasteries along the routes run pilgrim hostels on a donativo — you sleep in a building from the eleventh century, you put what you think it was worth in a box by the door, and nobody watches you do it.
A cell, if you want the real thing. Bed, desk, window, and a corridor that's quiet by nine.
A guest room, which is the common case and much less austere than the word monastery suggests. En suite, clean linen, breakfast laid out, and a view over a cloister garden that a hotel would charge you a supplement for.
Full board at a long table, in the places that do meals. Sometimes with the community, sometimes in silence with somebody reading aloud, sometimes with talk and a jug of wine — it varies far more than you'd think, and it's worth asking which kind you're walking into.
A cabin or a hermitage, self-catering, for people who want the setting and not the schedule. Firewood, a kettle, and a kilometre between you and everyone else.
An apartment, in the bigger city convents, for a family who need a kitchen and two bedrooms in the middle of Rome.
Some let you keep the guests' rhythm entirely to yourself. Some hand you a broom. Both are hospitality; they just come from different rules.
Spans, because these are freewill offerings as often as they are prices.
A room with a private bathroom and breakfast, booked through the Italian and Austrian platforms, generally runs €44 to €96 a night — the low end in a small town, the top end two streets from something famous.
Where it's full board, the number people are told to aim at sits around €50 a day, meals included, and that's the same figure in a French abbey as in a Spanish one. In Sweden the suggested contribution runs to roughly the same, with breakfast and a kitchen you use yourself.
The self-catering cabins are their own thing — Glenstal's are €65 a night with a three-night minimum, and the weekly rate falls the longer you stay, which is true almost everywhere: a month costs far less per night than a weekend.
On Mount Athos the bed and the meals are free. The permit costs €30 if you're not Orthodox, €18 if you are.
And on a donativo there is no number at all. There is a box, and a strong hint that the people running the place ate what you ate.
For scale: a hotel room in the centre of Rome, Florence or Dublin does not start with a four.
Write to the guest master. Not a booking engine — a person, usually reachable by one email address that has been on the same page for a decade. Say who you are, when you'd like to come, how many nights, and why. Two paragraphs. Anyone who has ever asked a stranger for a favour in writing already knows how.
Say what kind of stay you want. Wanting a quiet room and a walk is a perfectly good answer, and it is the answer most guests give. You are not required to want a spiritual experience, and pretending you do is the one thing that will make it awkward.
Book the cities months out. Rome, Florence, Venice, Assisi and Santiago fill early, and the convents fill earliest of all because there are so few rooms per house.
Expect a minimum stay. Two nights is common, three at the cabins, and several places will gently tell you that one night is not enough time to arrive.
Turn up in the afternoon. Check-in is often a two-hour window, because someone has to leave what they're doing to hand you a key.
Ask what the meals are. It's the single question that changes a stay the most, and the one people forget to ask.
Too much stimulation. Not enough silence. Nowhere in the week set aside to think about how you're actually living. That's the modern complaint, and it isn't remotely modern.
Hildegard of Bingen ran an abbey in the Rhine valley in the twelfth century and wrote the music, the medicine and the theology herself. She had a word for what a life needs in it: viriditas. Greenness — the damp, growing quality of a thing that is alive rather than merely working. Lose it and you don't break. You just go dry.
She's having a considerable revival nine hundred years on, which tells you something about the week most people are having. Her abbey at Eibingen is still there and still takes guests: sixteen single rooms, all meals, and a garden with a labyrinth in it.
Two days where nobody wants anything from you won't fix a life. It is still the cheapest self-reflection on the market.
Because the day already has a shape and it isn't yours.
You wake to a bell. Someone is singing at an hour you had no plans for. Breakfast is at a time, not whenever, and lunch is the same, and by the second day you notice you haven't checked anything, because there was nothing to check and nobody expecting you to.
That's the part the wellness industry is trying to bottle, and it costs a fortune, and it doesn't work nearly as well — because a retreat is a performance of calm put on for paying guests, and a monastery is just a place where some people happen to live like that, and have done since long before anyone thought to sell it.
You get to sit in the middle of it, uninvolved, welcome, and left alone.
Then you walk out through a gate into an ordinary town, with the whole day in front of you and a heart beating a bit slower than it did on Tuesday.
Take a night at either end. Guest houses have arrival windows, and one hotel night saves you from turning up at the wrong hour. → Find a hotel
Somewhere of your own for the rest of the trip. The week that follows the quiet bit needs a kitchen and a door of its own. → Find a house or apartment
A car, because a lot of these are up a hill. → Compare car hire
Keep the busy part either side of the quiet part. A walk with someone who knows the hills, a boat, a market morning — before or after, not during. → Find something to do
Getting there and home. → Compare flights and trains
The rest of the trip has to happen somewhere. Pick the country first. → Find your destination
None of this is a reason not to go. It's the list we'd want handed to us.
So pick a city you'd like to be in, and search it together with the word monastery or convent on either of the two booking sites above. Look at what a room costs, and at the picture of the garden. Most people who end up doing this began in exactly that spot: a photograph of a cloister garden, a price that looked like a mistake, and the slow realisation that anyone at all is allowed to book it.
If you book one of these, or try one, or talk yourself out of one — we would like to hear about it. Drop us a line.
— Birgitta & Anders
Some links here earn us a small commission. It never changes what we include — and when something is here for another reason, we say so.
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