Plan of the monastery

The monasteries were constituted in the average Ages as self-sufficient microcosms isolated from the population centers, where the monks organized their lives focusing on meditation, work and the praise of God, as dictated by the Rule of St. Benedict that governed the daily work of the Benedictine monasteries. The construction of Irache was carried out agreement the usual outline followed by Benedictine monastic complexes, with the head of the church facing east and the cloister and the rest of the monastic dependencies arranged to the south of the temple. Of the architectural ensemble that has survived to the present day, the oldest building is the Romanesque church (1) built between the second third of the 12th century and the first third of the 13th century. In the last third of the 16th century, the church underwent alterations, such as the choir loft at the base, the Wayside Cross vault, and the bell tower (2) in the Herrerian style built between 1601 and 1609. In the middle of the 17th century, the Baroque chapel of San Veremundo (3), attached to the north arm of the Wayside Cross, was added to the medieval temple. It was contracted in 1654 by the Riojan Juan Raón, Miguel Martínez and his son Juan, although, unfortunately, it was demolished in 1982.

The rest of the medieval dependencies were replaced by others undertaken in the centuries of the Modern Age, such as the Renaissance cloister (4), arranged to the southeast of the church and attached to the nave of the Epistle, begun by the north gallery under the direction of Martín de Oyarzábal (1540-1545), in which is the Puerta Preciosa (5), dated 1545, which allows access to the church from the cloister and vice versa. The rest of the lower cloister was built between the early 1570s and 1586, covering all the bays with elaborately designed ribbed vaults and housing a very complete and high quality stone sculptural program. On top of it, Juan de Sarobe built the over cloister, completed in 1589.

At the same time that the lower cloister was being built, the sacristy (6), attached to the south arm of the Wayside Cross, was constructed, followed by the chapter conference room (7), which is accessed from the eastern bay of the cloister, both rooms in which the complex ribbed vaults are once again present. The conference room was erected around 1574 by Amador de Segura, a master stonemason who also worked this year with Domingo de Irategui on the monumental staircase (8) in the southwest corner of the cloister, by which the monks descended from the rooms of the upper cloister, processioning along the south and east side until entering the church through the Preciosa door. At the end of the 16th century the monastery was endowed with a new refectory (9), built next to the conference room , occupying a large part of the eastern bay.

At right angles to the church and attached to the Renaissance monastery, a large rectangular building was built at the beginning of the 17th century to house the University of Irache (10), with stone facades in the Herrerian style, three stories high and a rhythmic arrangement of windows with lugs, whose rooms are distributed inside around a rectangular brick courtyard.