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The abbey was built on the Saint-Hilaire chapel dedicated to the first bishop who evangelized the region in the sixth century. The abbey experienced difficulties in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, particularly financial. During the French Revolution, the buildings were sold as national goods.

The Abbey of Saint-Maurice d'Agaune was founded in 515 by the future King of Burgundy Saint Sigismund on the site of an ancient sanctuary housing the relics of Maurice d'Agaune. The abbey is one of the most important monasteries created north of the Alps during the High Middle Ages. In 1560, the abbey was destroyed by a great fire followed, fifty years later, by a huge landslide following an earthquake. The abbey church was rebuilt with a new orientation in the 17th century and restored by the architect Claude Jaccottet after a collapse in 1942.

The Abbey of San Galgano is an ancient Cistercian abbey of the 13th century. The site includes the hermitage (called "Rotonda di Montesiepi") and the great abbey, today completely in ruins and reduced only to the walls. The prosperity of the monastery ceased at the end of the 14th century, when Italy was in a state of perpetual war and the warlords sacked the area. In 1577 a restoration of the setting was begun, but it did not prevent further degradation. In 1600, some sources claim that only one monk remained in the abbey, reduced to the state of a hermit.

The Abbey of San Giovanni Evangelista is a Benedictine complex built between 1510 and 1607. The marble facade of the abbey church was designed by Simone Moschino in late Mannerist style in 1604 and completed in 1607. The bell tower was added in 1613. With a height of 75 metres it is the highest in Parma.

The Abbey of San Pedro el Viejo is a 12th-century Romanesque building, one of the most important in Aragonese Romanesque art. An old Visigothic Christian temple once stood here, but shortly after Christian reconquered the town (1096), the church was converted into a Benedictine abbey and rebuilt accordingly.

The Abbey of Santa María la Real de Las Huelgas, is a monastery of Cistercian nuns of San Bernardo. It was founded in 1187 by King Alfonso VIII of Castile and his wife Leonor de Plantagenet. It houses works of great value, including some of the oldest stained glass windows in Spain.

The abbey Saint-Victor of Marseille was founded in the 5th century by Jean Cassien, near the tombs of martyrs of Marseille, among whom Saint Victor of Marseille († in 303 or 304). For more than 1,500 years, Saint-Victor is one of the high places of Catholicism in the south of France, and although the monastery was dismantled at the Revolution, the church is still assigned to worship. The abbey is classified as a historical monument since 1840.

The Abbey Sainte-Marie du Désert is a Trappist monastery founded in 1852, on a hermitage dating from the 12th century. In 1109, Marie Desclassan, a young nobleman, retired to the Herm Valley to live there as a hermit. She died in 1117, and her tomb became a place of pilgrimage under the name of Sainte-Marie-de-l'Herm. The chapel built on the site, spared by the Hundred Years' War, was destroyed during the French Revolution. In 1819, the parish priest of a neighbouring village rebuilt the chapel which revived the pilgrimage and eventually attracted a Cistercian community. The abbey has a small production of craft products, including mead.

The Abdinghof Monastery of St. Peter and Paul is a former Benedictine abbey founded in the 11th century. In the course of its existence, the monastery acquired cultural importance thanks to its library, its annexed school and its hospice. In addition, the monastery has long been the owner of land in the Weser region and along the Lower Rhine to the Netherlands. Secularised in 1803, the church is today a Protestant-Lutheran parish church.

St. Boniface is a Benedictine monastery founded in 1835 by King Ludwig I of Bavaria in a Byzantine style.