Poblet is a "real" monastery. Here monks dress the part (in white, being Cistercians). There are a few men in civilian dress, but they're secular priests, who have come on retreat. The monks serve in multiple services each day, from matins, at 5:15am, through lauds, mass, and vespers, to compline, at 9:30, and if their voices are not perfect, well, then, God calls men to the monastic life for other reasons than for music. The church bells ring shortly before each service, to wake the monks or to bring them home from their chores, and so the country round can use the church as a rough clock.
Our tour here was supposed to be in Dutch and English, but ended up being only in Dutch, with Margriet translating for the Americans. This guide didn't mind the extra time spent, however, and led us in round-about ways to keep allow other, speedier tours to "play through".
At one point, this monastery was the preferred final resting place for the kings of Aragon. (Catalunya and Aragon were joined through a political marriage way back in the 12th century. Catalunya/Aragon didn't get linked to Castille until the marriage of the Catholic kings, Ferdinand and Isabella, in the 15th century.) The crypts in the church never contained whole bodies, however, but only bones. One of the towers of the monastery is a turris pudoris, a tower of corruption, where the body would be stored until the flesh decayed. (Supposedly, this tradition has been restored, and the body of Juan Carlos's father is currently corrupting in a tower in Madrid.)
When the monasteries were nationalized, all of the bones were taken up and translated to a cathedral for safekeeping. They were restored when Poblet was rehabilitated, but had gotten jumbled in the meantime, and so each bone probably didn't end up back in the crypt from which it started.
