Monistrol de Montserrat

The town's recorded history begins in 888, when Count Wilfred the Hairy made a donation to the monastery of Santa María de Ripoll that included churches on and around the mountain of Montserrat. The name Monasteriolum — from which Monistrol derives — appears first in 942, in a document recording a purchase by Cesari, the founding abbot of the monastery of Santa Cecília de Montserrat. From that point, a village began to grow around a bridge and a prioral palace.

Construction of the bridge started under Prior Bernat Escarrer (1300–1322) and was completed, along with the prioral palace, under Jaume de Vivers (1348–1375), the town's first feudal lord. The completion of those works coincided with the arrival of the Black Death. The town counted 158 households in 1358; by 1378 that figure had fallen to 97.

Recovery came in the following century, driven by a period of active building that produced the public square, the town hall and the Font Gran. Agricultural and industrial growth through the 18th century pushed the population to 1,341 by 1787, and industrialisation drove it further to 2,332 by the end of the 19th century. Textile expansion and major infrastructure works between 1920 and 1930 — the Manresa road and the Ferrocarrils Catalans rail line — brought the population to 3,497 by 1935, before the Spanish Civil War reduced it again to 2,299 by 1950.

Recovery followed, helped by a wave of immigration from southern Spain in the late 1950s and by activity tied to the monastery. The town was officially called simply Monistrol until April 1984, when it became Monistrol de Montserrat.

The Llobregat river cuts through the municipality, with the original historic village on its right bank and newer residential developments on the left. The town sits 15 km south of Manresa, the comarca capital, and is well connected to Barcelona by the FGC rail line, with trains every half hour. From the station, the rack railway — the Cremallera — climbs directly to the monastery of Montserrat, where connections continue by funicular to the Santa Cova and Sant Joan, or by the yellow aerial cable car to Montserrat-Aeri station.