In a Spanish town on an island of the Mediterranean there is a convent of the Barefooted Carmelites, where the rule of the Order instituted by Saint Theresa is still kept with the primitive rigor of the reformation brought about by that illustrious woman.  Extraordinary as this fact may seem, it is true.  Though the monasteries of the Peninsula and those of the Continent were nearly all destroyed or broken up by the outburst of the French Revolution and the turmoil of the Napoleonic wars, yet on this island, protected by the British fleets, the wealthy convent and its peaceful inmates were sheltered from the dangers of change and general spoliation.  The storms from all quarters which shook the first fifteen years of the nineteenth century subsided ere they reached this lonely rock near the coast of Andalusia.  If the name of the great Emperor echoed fitfully upon its shores, it may be doubted whether the fantastic march of his glory or the flaming majesty of his meteoric life ever reached the comprehension of those saintly women kneeling in their distant cloister.

A conventual rigor, which was never relaxed, gave to this haven a special place in the thoughts and history of the Catholic world.  The purity of its rule drew to its shelter from different parts of Europe sad women, whose souls, deprived of human ties, longed for the death in life which they found here in the bosom of God.  No other convent was so fitted to wean the heart and teach it that aloofness from the things of this world which the religious life imperatively demands.  On the Continent may be found a number of such Houses, nobly planned to meet the wants of their sacred purpose.  Some are buried in the depths of solitary valleys; others hang, as it were, in mid-air above the hills, clinging to the mountain slopes or projecting from the verge of precipices.  On all sides man has sought out the poesy of the infinite, the solemnity of silence:  he has sought God; and on the mountain-tops, in the abysmal depths, among the caverned cliffs he has found Him.  Yet nowhere as on this European islet, half African though it be, can he find such differing harmonies all blending to lift the soul and quell its springs of anguish; to cool its fevers, and give to the sorrows of life a bed of rest.

The monastery is built at the extremity of the island at its highest part, where the rock by some convulsion of Nature has been rent sharply down to the sea, and presents at all points keen angles and edges, slightly eaten away at the water-line by the action of the waves, but insurmountable to all approach.  The rock is also protected from assault by dangerous reefs running far out from its base, over which frolic the blue waters of the Mediterranean.  It is only from the sea that the visitor can perceive the four principal parts of the square structure, which adheres minutely as to shape, height, and the piercing of its windows to the prescribed laws of monastic architecture.