Monasterio de San Miguel de los Reyes

This guide to the Monasterio de San Miguel de los Reyes in Valencia opens by asking you to imagine two thousand children laughing in a courtyard that held no sound like that for nearly a century. Founded in 1545 by Fernando de Aragon as a burial place for his wife and a home for Jeronymite monks, it stayed a monastery for close to three hundred years before the state turned it into a national prison in 1874. Hundreds of prisoners crowded these halls through the Spanish Civil War and Franco's dictatorship, and one escape, still remembered locally as the tunnel, saw four inmates dig their way out.