I stumbled across this beautiful property while I was exploring Paradise Island in the Bahamas.
This 12th century cloister was originally built by Augustinian monks in Montréjeau; a commune in southwestern France. It was then reassembled here in the Bahamas stone by stone. William Randolph Hearst, the American newspaper publisher, bought the cloister in France, but never assembled it. Huntington Hartford, the A&P supermarket heir, bought the cloister from Hearst and set about reconstructing it after he purchased all of Paradise Island. Unfortunately, the intricate stone parts of the cloister were not cataloged when the structure was moved from France – they all arrived completely unlabeled on Paradise Island. The reassembly of the complicated monument baffled everyone, and defied conventional methods of construction, until artist and sculptor Jean Castre-Manne set about doing it piece by piece. It took him 2 years to reassemble it, and what we see today presumably bears some similarity to the original.
This cloister is one of only 4 on Earth that have ever been removed from France. A cloister (from Latin, “enclosure”) is a covered walkway or open gallery, running along the walls of buildings and forming a quadrangle. The attachment of a cloister to a church usually indicates that it is (or once was) part of a monastic foundation, “forming a continuous and solid architectural barrier…that separates the world of the monks from that of the serfs and workmen.”
This cloister is set among a quarter-mile long French style garden called Versailles Gardens. The Versailles Gardens on Paradise Island comprise a multi-terraced landscape set in a rectangular design. Throughout the length of Versailles, a stone path covered in Bermuda grass connects the terraces and demarcates Versailles into two perfectly mirrored halves. Rock ridges extend to the east and to the west of this path,
The Cloister and Versailles Gardens, owned by the One&Only Ocean Club Resort is free to visit, and open to the public, but if you get too close to the Ocean Club, you will be asked to turn around and head back south towards the cloister.