Montserrat Monastery

Montserrat Monastery tickets: which one to buy

The basilica is free to enter, and so is the walk up to it once you are on the mountain, so the choices are about transport and extras. From Barcelona the classic route is the train from Placa Espanya, then either the rack railway or the cable car for the last stretch; combined tickets sold at the station cover train plus your choice of ascent, and adding the funiculars, museum and audiovisual show costs a little more. The cable car is faster and more dramatic, the rack railway steadier and better if you dislike heights.

Organised day trips from Barcelona cost several times the train fare and buy you a guide, a fixed schedule and usually a stop at a winery or a tasting; some include the basilica visit with the Black Madonna, which otherwise means queueing separately. Choir tickets are sold for the boys' choir performance. If you want the mountain rather than the monastery, take the Sant Joan funicular and walk the ridge paths, which cost nothing beyond the lift.

Visiting Montserrat Monastery: what to see

Benedictines have been on this serrated mountain since the eleventh century, and the monastery grew around an image of the Virgin found, according to legend, in a cave nearby. La Moreneta, the Black Madonna, is a Romanesque wooden statue of the late twelfth century, dark from age and varnish rather than by design, enthroned above the high altar. Pilgrims climb the stairs behind the altar to touch the orb in her right hand, which is the single busiest queue on the mountain.

The basilica itself was rebuilt after Napoleon's troops burned the complex in 1811, so the building is mostly nineteenth century around a sixteenth-century core. The Escolania, the boys' choir attached to the monastery, is among the oldest in Europe and sings the Virolai in the basilica on most days at one o'clock, a short performance that fills the church. The museum holds Caravaggio, El Greco, Monet and Picasso, an unexpectedly strong collection for a mountain abbey.

Montserrat Monastery opening hours and the best time to go

The basilica opens early and closes in the evening, with a break in the middle of the day at some seasons; the Black Madonna is accessible on a shorter schedule and the queue is longest just before the choir sings. That performance is at one o'clock on weekdays and there is no ticket, but arriving twenty minutes early is the difference between a seat and the back wall; the choir does not sing in July or at Christmas when the boys are away.

Weekends and Catalan holidays fill the mountain. Weather matters more than the season here: the massif makes its own cloud, and a day that is clear in Barcelona can be fog at 700 metres, which spoils both the views and the cable car. Dress modestly for the basilica. Allow half a day for monastery and choir, a full day if you add walking; the path to Sant Jeroni, the highest point at 1,236 metres, takes about ninety minutes each way from the top funicular station.