Archaeologists Excavating a Monastery in Spain Identified the Remains of a 14th-Century Queen—and Multiple Skeletons Buried in the Wrong Graves

The tomb of Elisenda of Montcada has long fascinated experts. But the team was surprised to learn that burials supposedly belonging to a medieval knight and an abbess held entirely different individuals

Meilan Solly | Senior Associate Digital Editor, History

June 3, 2026 9:01 a.m.

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When Elisenda of Montcada, the onetime queen of the Kingdom of Aragon, died in 1364, she was buried in a marble sepulcher in what is now Barcelona, Spain. One side of the tomb pays tribute to her royal status, while the other alludes to her later years as a devout widow living in a monastic community.

Elisenda founded the Royal Monastery of St. Mary of Pedralbes in 1327, retiring there the following year, after the death of her husband, James II of Aragon. She spent nearly four decades in the community, wielding power and influence over the Poor Clare order of nuns despite never formally taking religious vows. Now, a groundbreaking research project has shed new light on the medieval queen’s tomb, as well as other burials around the church.

As the Culture Institute of Barcelona notes in a statement, excavations revealed that Elisenda was interred in a wooden box, in austere attire befitting a nun. Archaeologists also recovered fragments of silk woven with gold thread—artifacts more in line with the burial of a high-ranking individual.

The new research contradicts earlier theories about the tomb’s layout. The side depicting Elisenda in royal regalia faces the presbytery, inside the church, while the other opens into the cloister, a covered walkway surrounding an exterior courtyard. Previously, experts believed that Elisenda’s sarcophagus straddled a wall between the presbytery and the cloister. “But archaeology has debunked the myth,” Sílvia Marimon writes for the Catalan newspaper Ara. In actuality, the tomb consists of two back-to-back sections “separated by a small wall, an architectural solution that allowed the queen a double immortality: as a powerful sovereign facing the church and as a humble penitent facing the cloister.”

When researchers analyzed Elisenda’s skeleton, they found that she was relatively tall for the era, measuring roughly 5-foot-3. The queen, who was about 70 when she died, suffered from multiple bone diseases that likely caused her pain. The team has extracted DNA samples from her remains in hopes of learning more about her life and lineage.

Born around 1292, Elisenda was the daughter of a wealthy Catalan noblewoman and a high-ranking steward. She married James in 1322, becoming the Aragonese king’s fourth wife. The couple never had children, so Elisenda’s “power within the palace would have been very limited” after James’ death, Anna Castellano-Tresserra, the monastery’s director, told Ara earlier this year. “Widows who were not the mother of a future king usually met a rather sad end because they were sidelined at court.”

Elisenda, however, maintained a degree of influence in the kingdom. As the Culture Institute writes on its website, the queen “did not stand on the sidelines of the political life of the realm, nor the life of the Poor Clare community itself, on whose behalf she issued four ordinances and to whom she left most of her possessions.” The measures in question outlined how the funding provided by Elisenda should be used and the size of the monastic community, among other aspects of life at Pedralbes.

In addition to excavating Elisenda’s tomb, the researchers opened seven other graves, uncovering a total of 24 individuals, including nuns and Catalan noblewomen. The project represented “an opportunity to study the physical characteristics of these people and also everything surrounding funerary gestures and burial systems in these types of communities,” says Josep Maria Vila, director of the archaeological project, per the Catalan news site APD.

Some of the deceased were buried in sarcophagi, while others were wrapped in textiles. In several cases, the graves believed to belong to specific individuals held the skeletons of entirely different people, raising new questions. The tomb of Aragonese knight Artau de Foces, for example, contained the remains of three infants and two young women. Although he married twice, both of his wives died at older ages, suggesting that the remains in the tomb belonged to different individuals.

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The body of Francesca Saportella, the monastery’s second abbess and a niece of Elisenda, was also missing from its tomb. Inside the marble sepulcher, archaeologists discovered nine sets of remains seemingly deposited at different points in the monastery’s history. According to Ara, four are men whose skulls have stab wounds; scholars say the injuries are consistent with weapons used during the Peninsular War in the early 19th century. Another is a woman who died about halfway through her pregnancy.

One of the most puzzling discoveries came from the grave of Sobirana d’Olzet, the monastery’s first abbess. As Kristina Killgrove writes for Live Science, the bones found in the tomb are “consistent with what is known about her life.” The scholars were surprised, however, to find evidence of “a traumatic injury to her face that happened shortly before or at the time of her death.” Per the statement, the scholars are now analyzing the remains to pinpoint the timing and nature of the injury. They plan to release a full report on the burials in 2027, once they have a clearer understanding of the individuals’ genetic ties, health issues and causes of death.

As the Culture Institute says in the statement, “The challenge for the next year will be to transform these first findings into a complete historical interpretation that allows us to better understand not only who these people were, but also how they lived, how they died and how they were remembered.”

Meilan Solly | Read More

Meilan Solly is a senior associate digital editor at Smithsonian magazine, where she oversees the online history section. Solly's specialties are Tudor England, medieval Europe and World War II.