Sant Miquel de Cruilles
Place of worship · Girona
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Sant Miquel de Cruïlles is a Romanesque church built in the first half of the 11th century, once a Benedictine monastery placed under the Italian abbey of San Michele della Chiusa in 1057. Its three naves and semicircular apses carry Lombard arcading, and the apse still holds a faded fresco of facing lions. Remences sacked the monastery in 1485; only the church and stretches of wall remain today.
A second Romanesque mural survives in the north transept, less famous than the apse lions but rarer: a scene of Judas's betrayal of Christ, painted in a style close enough to the Ripoll monastery's scriptorium that art historians read it as evidence of shared workshops across Romanesque Catalonia. The monastery's founding date is not recorded; the earliest surviving reference is a 1035 testament by Gilabert de Cruïlles, from the noble family whose name the site still carries, and Countess Ermessenda of Barcelona was making bequests to it by 1057. It grew through the following century, absorbing the parish church of Santa Eulàlia de Cruïlles and a small priory at Rocafort by the mid-12th century. Decline set in later: by 1592 only a prior and a single monk remained, and the Bishop of Girona folded the community into Sant Pere de Galligants along with another failing house, Sant Miquel de Fluvià. French troops occupied the site during the Peninsular War in the early 19th century, by which point it had long stopped functioning as a monastery.
What you see
A beveled stone dome rises over the crossing, a squat cimbori visible above the church roofline from the surrounding fields.
monasterybenedictineromanesque frescoesgothic retable