Heilsbronn Abbey, Cistercian monastery in Heilsbronn, Germany.

Heilsbronn Abbey is a former Cistercian monastery whose surviving church, the Münster, is a Romanesque basilica restored between 1851 and 1866. The photograph shows a building of light grey and tan stone blocks with a steep tiled roof, three tall pointed-arch windows with stone mullions and dark glass, and a slender spire with a cross above a square tower. The monastic buildings have mostly disappeared.

Bishop Otto I of Bamberg founded the abbey in 1132 as a daughter house of Ebrach Abbey, whose monks formed the first convent under Abbot Rapotho. The counts of Abenberg acted as its patrons and were buried in a chapel of the Münster. Their lands, including Abenberg Castle and Cadolzburg, passed by marriage in 1236 to the Hohenzollerns, and in 1297 Burgrave Frederick III became the first Hohenzollern buried in the choir crypt.

The Münster holds the graves of ten burgraves of Nuremberg, five margraves and three electors of Brandenburg; Burgrave Frederick III was the first Hohenzollern buried in the choir crypt in 1297. More than 40 counts of Abenberg lie in a burial chapel. In 1631 Tilly's soldiers plundered the Hohenzollern tombs, after which Margrave Albrecht II moved the family burial place to St. Johannis in Ansbach.

The Münster, a Romanesque basilica restored between 1851 and 1866, is the main surviving building; the monastic buildings have largely disappeared. Inside, look for the choir with the Hohenzollern graves and the paintings attributed to Albrecht Dürer. The abbey church stands in the centre of Heilsbronn, and the former monastic buildings now house the Religious Education Centre of the Evangelical-Lutheran Church in Bavaria.

The abbey library passed to the University of Erlangen in 1748 and 1770, and its holdings have since been digitised and made available online. The monastery also ran a busy scriptorium and a bookbindery, and its library held a notable collection of incunabula.