Question: Who purchased the cloisters of the Ancient Spanish Monastery, which is now in North Miami Beach, from Spain in 1925?
Answer: William Randolph Hearst
William Randolph Hearst bought the monastery’s cloisters in 1925. The cloisters were taken apart stone by stone and shipped to the U.S. in 11,000 separate, numbered boxes. Unfortunately for Hearst, the cloisters’ stones had been shipped with hay that was possibly contaminated with hoof-and-mouth disease, which had just broken out in Spain. The boxes were quarantined and emptied, the hay was burned, and the stones were returned haphazardly, with no effort to match them to their original numbered boxes. The cloisters remained in boxes in a warehouse in Brooklyn until Hearst’s death in 1952.
