Old kitchen

The north wing is almost completely lost. Nothing remains of the calefactorium. The refectory remained standing until it was blown up at the beginning of the 20th century to use its stone as a building material. Its façade to the cloister and part of the corbels and arches of its western wall remain.

This is precisely the medianil that it shares with the medieval kitchen, the only preserved conference room of this part of the monastery. It is located in a strategic place. On the one hand, it communicates directly with the monks' refectory; on the other hand, it is very close to the old hostelry, cellar, cilla and lay quarters, so that a single facility met the needs of all the inhabitants of the monastery. As we have already observed in the cloister, the Cistercian monks needed the converts to live in the monastery, although they had to be radically separated from them. The role of the laymen in farming the farms and work in the workshops was fundamental to the very life and development of the Cistercian abbeys. The traces of openings and architectural Structures present in the western wall of the kitchen and the angled staircase itself seem to confirm the presence, in the north-western corner of the cloister, of the refectory and the dormitory of the laymen, both of which have unfortunately been lost.

Its internal definition is divided into two rectangular sections, covered by vaults with square cross arches. They rest on six conical corbels with vegetal decoration of four plain leaves enhanced with a double incised line. They match perfectly with those of the supports in the chapel of Saint Jesus Christ, so their chronology may be similar. The two gables still have a large, flared, semicircular central opening, which must have been used to evacuate smoke and gases. We do not know where the hearth was located. On the south wall there is a rectangle of ashlars reddened by fire; however, given the successive changes of use of the conference room (it came to be used as a forge), it is not possible to say whether the medieval hearth was located there.