Top of the World
The Carthusian Monastery of Santa Maria de la Defension is located approximately 5 kilometers from the city of Jerez de la Frontera (Jerez – Algeciras road), just next to one of the accesses to the highway Jerez-Seville, between the villages of El Solete Alto and La Cartuja. The monastery was founded in 1476 by Don Álvaro Overtos, a jerezan gentleman descended fro a noble Genoese family. In 1835 this Andalusian Carthusian was expropiated by the State, with which it was abandoned by the monks. The Order of San Bruno recovered it in 1948 and once materially restored it occupies a new community of Carthusians. Carthusian Monastery of Santa María de la Defensión Jerez de la FronteraThe Cartuja de Santa Maria de la Defension is one of the most outstanding and beautiful monasteries of the Carthusian Order in Spain for its artistic quality. Its construction began in 1478 although the majority of its dependencies were realized during the XVI century. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries some reforms and extensions were carried out. It should be noted that the church was completed in 1552, is a building of longitudinal plant with a single nave and chapel of the tabernacle, which is covered with splendid vaults of starry cross. Of great artistic important is its facade realized in 1667. It is a stone facade with structure of altarpiece, typical of the Andalusian baroque, characterized for producing and illusion of ascensional movement. Apart from the church, it is possible to emphasize the claustrillo annexed to the temple, , made in the sixteenth century with slender arches and buttresses.
