Cloisters can be peaceful, beautiful places to visit especially if you enjoy monasteries, abbeys, convents or cathedral churches. Sometimes even religious colleges will have a cloister attached.

Cloisters are covered passages or pathways, usually in the shape of a rectangle or square, with colonnades open to the interior courtyard. The first cloisters were created during medieval times and were built attached to the monastery or abbey to be used for educational studies, exercise, walking, meditating, general recreation, or just providing a covered walkway to another part of the religious complex. But cloisters also provide natural beauty, stately architecture, solitude and quiet.