The monastery of Santa María de la Caridad was the first female Cistercian community to be founded in the Iberian Peninsula on the initiative of the monarch García Ramírez with nuns from the monastery of Lumen Die in Favars (France), settling in Tudela in 1147. Around 1157 they established their headquarters final in Tulebras thanks to the royal donation of this small village in Navarre by Sancho VI the Wise.

From the middle of the 12th century until the first half of the following century, the construction of the medieval Romanesque monastery of agreement was undertaken at the usual Cistercian outline , consisting of a central cloister around which the main spaces were arranged, the church, the chapter house conference room , the refectory, the kitchen and the dormitory. Only the general physiognomy of its ground plan, the abbey church with a single nave and semicircular chevet on the perimeter walls, and three stone arches of the Romanesque cloister corresponding to the entrance to the primitive conference room chapterhouse have been preserved from that medieval building.

The presence in the Tulebrense monastery of nuns belonging to important Navarrese lineages made it possible to build new buildings at Building thanks to the generous donations made by those families and other prominent patrons. Thus, under the abbacy of Ana de Beaumont (1506-1524), daughter of the lords of Monteagudo, Francisco el Darocano built a new brick cloister enclosed with ribbed vaults in the 1520s. For her part, the abbess María de Beaumont y Navarra (1547-1559), daughter of the 4th Count of Lerín and Constable of Navarra, managed to get the Visitor General of the Cistercians in the Crown of Aragon and Navarra, Hernando de Aragón, Archbishop of Zaragoza, to grant her 500 pounds to finance the elaborate ribbed vaults in the nave of the church, from whose central keystones hang the coats of arms of the said benefactor. His successor at the head of the monastery, Ana Pasquier de Eguaras (1559-1573) obtained a similar sum from the same prelate, with which the village worker Pedro Verges completed the vaulting of the church between 1563 and 1565, who also built a new chapterhouse conference room , the chapel of San Bernardo and the choir loft of the church. The temple was also adorned with the Renaissance altarpiece dedicated to the Dormition of the Virgin (1565-1570) which presided over the chancel behind the altar until the last century, attributed to Jerónimo Vicente Vallejo Cosida, an Aragonese painter and artistic advisor of Hernando de Aragón.

In the 1620s the nuns promoted the construction of the over cloister in order to make the monastery more habitable and comfortable, with individual rooms to remedy the unhealthy conditions of the common dormitory, which like the rest of the monastery was badly affected by damp, on which Pascual de Horaa and Jerónimo Baquero worked. Likewise, in the mid-18th century, the renovation of the abbey palace was undertaken, as well as the guest quarters and other spaces, such as the chapel of San Bernardo, which was covered with a lantern dome decorated with plasterwork with profuse vegetation, in accordance with Baroque tastes.

After the disentailment of Mendizábal (1837), the nuns were deprived of all their property, so they had serious financial difficulties in maintaining the monastic complex, which at the beginning of the 20th century was again threatening to collapse. 

From the 1970s onwards, with Mother Isabel Íñigo (1963-1975) at the head of the abbey, encouraged by a young nun from Cadiz, Sister Margarita Barra, abbess from 1982 to 2007, the community made possible the rehabilitation of the architectural complex, with the aim, on the one hand, of putting an end to the lamentable state of deterioration in which the building was found, and on the other, of making it more habitable and comfortable agreement to the new times, work which was completed in 1996. The various reforms of the monastery were carried out by the nuns themselves, with the sole criterion of restoring refund the building to its original medieval appearance, even at the cost of eliminating part of its architectural past with several centuries of history. An intervention that would have been unfeasible today, both because the monastery was declared an Asset of Cultural Interest in 1994, and because nowadays the restorations must respect all the constructive phases of the monument.

On 11 May 1970, with great enthusiasm and without any financial aid, the nuns began the repair of the church, which they stripped of the coverings and additions to recover the austerity typical of the Cistercian style, revealing the Romanesque apse and the original altar table under the main altarpiece. A stonemason from Navarre and another from Galicia were the only officials in a work that would be unthinkable today, without an architect or building engineer. For this business the nuns extracted the stone from the quarry located in the place called Cabezo de la Tejería, belonging to the municipality of Tulebras, for which they used gunpowder brought by themselves from the Fort of San Cristóbal de Pamplona.

Photographs from before this reform, kept in the photographic file of the religious community of Tulebras, show that a wall divided the nave of the church into two choirs, the nuns' choir, located in front of the presbytery and statement with the door that led to the cloister; and behind this wall a second choir for the converses, a smaller area from which they accessed the corridor that led to their quarters. The nuns modified the interior space of the church by removing the choir of the converses and placing the only oak choir stalls at the foot of the nave (1972), where all the nuns sit to celebrate the liturgy, as well as a new organ (2001). Likewise, the choir loft built by Pedro Verges over the lower choir, in which the Renaissance choir stalls built by the sculptor Bernal de Gabadi (1589-1591) had been placed, was removed, as well as the main altarpiece that had presided over the church since the last third of the 16th century, since, as is typical of the Cistercian rule, only those elements essential for worship were kept.

They also exposed the medieval stone of the church walls, removing the plaster coats of arms of the prelate Hernando de Aragón that had been fixed to the upper part and the registration that commemorated the new vaulting financed by him. The lime applied to the brick and plaster vaults was also removed and replaced with a pictorial decoration that simulates the stone cutting of ashlars from agreement in Renaissance style.

The reformation of the church is also visible on the outside. Before the remodelling at the end of the 20th century, there were a series of additions that completely concealed the north wall of the church, to the extent that access to the temple was gained through a small open door next to the medieval door, which was then hidden and covered by an altar. Everything fell under the relentless pickaxe of the nuns, and once the rubble was removed, the Romanesque doorway, which was very deteriorated, was brought to light and some of the capitals were replaced by new ones. The entire north side of the nave of the church had to be rebuilt in its entirety, and the nuns obtained authorisation from the Civil Governor of Navarre to obtain gunpowder with which they opened a small quarry located a few kilometres from the monastery, from where they took the stone with which they carved the ashlars necessary for the repairs.

The apse was also renovated, restoring its medieval appearance and eliminating the buttresses that had been added in the 16th century to counteract the weight of the ribbed vault, keeping only the south-facing abutment, buttresses that concealed one of the medieval discoid funerary stelae now on display in the monastery museum.

For its part, the cloister erected in the 16th century was a space that was completely sealed off in the 20th century, in which it was impossible to see its arcades. After the intervention, the brickwork was recovered with its pointed arches and openings with Mudejar latticework, which have been closed with glass, as well as the two Romanesque doors leading to the church from the cloister that were hidden, one for the nuns in the choir, an opening that had been converted into a kind of confessional box, and another door for the nuns, simpler with a semicircular arch with voussoirs.

This was followed by the renovation of the monastic buildings, such as the new chapterhouse conference room , which replaced the Renaissance one, the abbey palace and the guest house, the latter with the financial aid of the Institución Príncipe de Viana, and the creation of a museum in the space of the old dormitory and the Roman tower with the aim of making the works of art preserved inside accessible to the public, which the nuns themselves explain enthusiastically to all those who come to visit it.

Nowadays the monastery, constructively speaking, enjoys good health, thanks to the will and effort of the nuns who undertook the rehabilitation of the building motu proprio motu from the last third of the 20th century with exemplary and patient submission, taking to its ultimate consequences the maxim of ora et labora of the Benedictine rule in the effort to preserve the architectural heritage inherited from their predecessors, restoring with their own hands the monastic complex that they have inhabited uninterruptedly from its foundation in the 12th century to the present day.