Mysterium Fidei

This app provides you with a tour at the St. Catherine's Monastery Garden in Valletta. https://goo.gl/maps/pkoGcW6Hjz9Nm7tu9

You are in the monastery’s garden. A oasis of peace and silence, that grows ripe fruit and vegetables, providing for the monastery and beyond. Within these walls, you feel you have entered a different world, from that existing outside its doors. Looking up, you can see the monastery building blissfully resting on the serenity of this garden. Around it are three wells that provide fresh water, the source of life. Around its walls, a vine spreads beautifully like veins, with wine running through them. In the middle, peach, orange and lemon trees provide lush fruit, baked by the warm Maltese sun. The earth gives life to beautiful red tomatoes, and herbs that have imbued flavours and aromas to countless meals to the cloistered nuns, throughout four hundred years of history.

This garden is the backbone of life at the monastery. From it, the nuns provided meals, to them and to those who daily knocked on their doors for something warm to eat. The nuns, devoting their lives to prayer and contemplation, found, in their garden, a source of nourishment, serenity and rest. Colours, together with light and shadow contrasts, make this garden truly impressive.

The glory of gardening: hands in the dirt, head in the sun, heart with nature. To nurture a garden is to feed not just on the body, but the soul.