Ten Isolated, Gravity-Defying Monasteries You Can Visit Around the World

For centuries, monks have sought solitude and isolation on their path to spiritual enlightenment, choosing some of the most remote places on the globe to construct their monasteries.

Some of these residences, like the Meteora Monasteries in Greece and Popa Taung Kalat in Myanmar, were built at the summits of massive monoliths that dominate the entire landscape. Others, like the Hanging Temple in China and Sumela Monastery in Turkey, virtually hover in midair, carefully balanced on the faces of steep, rocky cliffs.

From the Buddhist traditions of Asia to the Christian traditions of Europe and the Near East, these ten isolated monasteries are among the world’s most gravity-defying spiritual sites.

Meteora Monasteries, Greece

Six of the 24 Orthodox Christian monasteries strewn across Meteora, a collection of massive stone pillars and rounded boulders in northwestern Greece, are still active more than 700 years after the first was founded in the 14th century. They chose this breathtakingly inaccessible location for various reasons, says Ioannis Poulios, an expert in cultural heritage management at Greece’s Ionian University and a licensed tour guide. “It is a remote place, far from the urban centers, a place of tranquility and contemplation, which was considered ideal for full dedication to God,” he says. “Like a natural continuation of the rocks, the monasteries are an inseparable part of the landscape.” Their perilous location “also provided natural protection from thefts and wars” during the occupation of Greece by the Ottoman Turks, the period in which the monasteries were at the peak of their importance.

When the sanctuaries were built, there were only two ways to them: climbing up a 1,200-foot vertical path of ladders or being hoisted in a net by ropes flung from above. Steps carved into the cliffs in the 1920s made reaching Meteora’s monasteries somewhat easier, though, and today they welcome around 2.5 million visitors every year. Tourism “affects the environment of tranquility and contemplation at Meteora,” says Poulios, but it’s nothing the rugged residents can’t handle. “The monastic communities of Meteora have experienced a whole series of complexities. [They’ve] survived by continually conducting the rituals” that have been practiced here for centuries.

Paro Taktsang, Bhutan

The Buddhist monastic tradition has two sides, says Matthew King, a scholar of Buddhist studies and director of Asian studies at the University of California, Riverside. There are monasteries in populated locations that are deeply invested in the spirituality and economy of local communities, and then there are isolated hermitages to which monks and nuns retreat for periods of deep meditation. Bhutan’s Paro Taktsang, which is tucked into the folds of a jagged cliff at the entrance to the Taktsang Senge Samdup cave, is the latter. According to legend, Guru Padmasambhava, who is believed to have introduced Buddhism to Bhutan, rode to the mountain on the back of a tiger in the eighth century, spending three years, three months, three weeks, three days and three hours meditating in its caverns. After centuries of subsequent visits by prominent monks, the Bhutanese leader Gyalse Tenzin Rabgye laid the monastery’s first stone at the caves in 1692. Monks typically spend three years living and meditating in the gold-crowned complex at Paro Taktsang, starting each morning with the 4 a.m. turning of the prayer wheel. Visitors to the monastery—one of the most famous sites in Bhutan—travel the same way the monks do, hiking one of three steep paths 10,000 feet up from the valley floor.

Bobbio Abbey (Abbazia di San Colombano), Italy

Before the invention of the printing press around 1440, books were painstakingly reproduced by hand in the monasteries of Europe. Bobbio Abbey “had one of the greatest libraries of all the monasteries in the Middle Ages,” says Lauren Mancia, a historian of medieval Christian devotional practices at Brooklyn College in New York. The isolated site in northern Italy was chosen by an Irish monk, the future St. Columbanus, for his monastery in 614. Over the next few centuries, the abbey’s importance as a place of study and prayer, as well as its political and cultural significance, only grew. By the late tenth century, Bobbio housed a collection of around 700 ancient manuscripts. Although the French suppressed, or dissolved, the monastery in 1803, its volumes were preserved. Today, the ancient scriptorium is home to the abbey’s museum and open to visitors along with the monastery’s Renaissance-style basilica and main cloister.

Popa Taung Kalat, Myanmar

“Over the course of many centuries all across Asia, Buddhist monks and nuns undertook their ordained life in reference to the Buddha and the original sangha, but in ways that were deeply shaped by their cultural, economic and political environment,” says King. In Myanmar (formerly known as Burma), it was the Nats, the demigod protectors of Buddhist practitioners deeply intertwined with Burmese culture, who inspired the construction of Popa Taung Kalat on top of an extinct volcano they call Taung Ma-gyi, the “mother hill.” Legend has it that the great Nat Popa Medaw, a flower-eating ogre who transformed into a beautiful woman after falling in love with a royal emissary, lives at the summit, granting wishes to worshipers who scale the monolith’s 777-step spiral staircase. The monastery is also home to pink-robe-wearing novice monks, who train at Taung Kalat, and yetis, or hermit monks, who glide in their peaked caps in quiet contemplation across the precariously balanced complex.

Sevanavank Monastery, Armenia

High above the sapphire waters of Armenia’s Lake Sevan stand the stone remains of Sevanavank Monastery. The monastery was founded here in 874, at the site of one of the country’s first Christian churches, built in 305, following a dream a hermit-monk who’d lived for ten years on the island had about the 12 apostles. When the Princess Mariam heard his vision, she ordered the monastery’s construction right away as one of the 30 she’d promised to build in honor of her deceased husband. While a drop in the lake’s water level has since turned the island into a peninsula, two of its churches, Surb Arakelots and Surb Astvatsatsin, still remain, along with what’s left of a fortress wall built in the tenth century to protect the spiritual site.

Montserrat Monastery, Spain

The legend of the Montserrat Monastery in Spain begins in the ninth century, when an image of the mother of God was discovered in one of the caves inside Montserrat, the “serrated mountain.” By 945, the Benedictine sanctuary, St. Cecilia at Montserrat, had been built, attracting Christian pilgrims by the thousands to its isolated perch 4,000 feet above a Catalan valley. It is still one of several historic monasteries where visitors in search of retreat, study and reflection can stay overnight, a tradition that goes back to the medieval period. Guests “always had a special place in the monastery’s mission,” says Mancia. “All guests had to be received as Christ, [and] medieval tourists on pilgrimage often lodged at monasteries en route to their final destination, as did kings and other monastics who were traveling on business or on pilgrimage.” Although the original buildings are no longer standing—they were destroyed by Napoleon’s army in the early 19th century—the monastery was faithfully reconstructed in the decades that followed. The modern Montserrat is home to around 70 Benedictine monks, whose lives revolve around solitude, hospitality and five prayer services a day.

The Hanging Temple, China

When monk Liao Ran chose a spot 40 miles southeast of Datong to build the Hanging Temple in 491, he heeded the Taoist principle that temples should be far from the sounds of the earthbound world. According to legend, he worked alone to balance the wooden monastery on a shallow lip 160 feet up the sheer cliffside at Jinlong Gorge. Today, the monastery is known for honoring all three of China’s main religions—Taoism, Buddhism and Confucianism. The choice was made so that travelers of all faiths could find respite there when passing through the remote region. Although the Hanging Temple doesn’t technically hang—holes as deep as ten feet were drilled into the rock to stabilize it—its hovering precipice is still dangerous. For safety reasons, the number of visitors who can enter the monastery’s 40 halls at any one time is restricted to 80, and wooden pillars were added to keep the whole structure stable. Visit early in the morning for the shortest wait, and don’t fret about the weather. The monastery was ingeniously placed beneath a small overhang that prevents it from getting soaked on rainy days.

Ostrog Monastery, Montenegro

Constructed inside a cave high in the stone clavicle of Montenegro’s enormous plateau, Ostroska Greda, the Ostrog Monastery is one of the most important Serbian Orthodox Christian pilgrimage sites in the Balkans. Although the mountain’s caves had long been places of sanctuary and prayer, the monastery itself was built in the early 17th century. Not long after, in 1671, it became the final resting place of Bishop Vasilije, the miracle-working future St. Basil to whom the monastery was dedicated. The complex is split into upper and lower sections, and pilgrims traditionally crawl or walk the nearly two-mile distance between them barefoot. But while Ostrog is still actively occupied by monks (and dorm rooms are available for pilgrims), this monastery, like other historic monasteries throughout Europe, no longer has the same spiritual and cultural significance for most of the population as it would have in its early days, Mancia explains. Monasteries “have taken on the meaning of cultural heritage as a part of a national history,” an idea that didn’t even exist at the time of their original construction. It’s a concept that’s “quite poignant and important, but is totally un-medieval,” she says.

Sumela Monastery, Turkey

The Greek Orthodox Sumela Monastery snuggles up against a steep cliff hundreds of feet above the Altindere Valley in Turkey’s northern Pontic Mountains. Since its founding sometime in the late fourth century, Sumela has had a history full of ups and downs. First famous for containing an icon of the Virgin Mary said to be painted by the Apostle Luke, the monastery fell into ruin multiple times before being enlarged and restored in the sixth century. Its current form dates to the 13th century, though much of the complex had to be rebuilt after being abandoned then ravaged by fire in 1930. Sumela’s main rock church was one of a few structures to survive the ordeal. Its walls, as well as those belonging to a chapel reached by secret passage, are still covered in frescoes more than 600 years old. But even in the 21st century, Sumela’s survival has faced challenges. An increase in rock falls around 2015 forced managers to close the monastery to visitors for three and a half years. They cleared 4,000 tons of rock away before reopening the site to tourists and pilgrims in 2019.

Key Monastery, India

Around 200 young monks live at Key Monastery, a complex of white temples and sanctuaries that crawl up the sides of a steep, pyramidal hill in India’s Spiti Valley. They come for an education in both secular and spiritual matters, learning Tibetan Buddhist teachings at the home of the revered reincarnations of the “Great Translator” of the 10th and 11th centuries, Lochen Rinchen Zangpo. The monastery is especially known for its incredible wall hangings and a cache of artifacts associated with centuries of Rinchen Zangpo’s reborn earthly form. Despite a millennium of history, Buddhist monasteries like Key aren’t stuck in the ways of those early days. Monks are “adapting the ways they serve [to] prosper, or just survive, in a rapidly changing world,” says King. While Key Monastery still depends on the local community for donations to meet its daily needs, today it also has a website that allows the monastery to expand its reach to address larger issues like improving sewage infrastructure. It’s a small change compared to some. In Japan, for example, at least one temple has traded human monks for robot monks programmed to share the lessons of the Buddha.