This is one of the town´s most striking buildings, located in the north-west of the Medieval quarter. Its construction is Baroque, from the mid-18th century, and it is located in the old Medieval convent founded at the end of the 13th century. According to tradition, it was founded by Queen Violante of Castile and León, Alfonso X´s wife. In 1282 she ordered two significant nuns to be take to the Allariz convent from one in Zamora. This took place fifty years after the first Clarissan foundation in the Peninsula. The queen lived in the convent after family disputes over succession to the throne, between the princes of La Cerda and her son Sancho IV. Sancho IV made a donation, in 1286, of the site where the convent was built, granting property tights, and permission to found a town for the building´s constructors, their families and subjects of the abbess, who worked the convent lands, exempt from tribute. So the convent grew and the domain of St Clair in Allariz expanded, collaborating over time in the town´s development as an urban centre protected by the Crown. ART.- The convent building was reconstructed in the 18th century. Nowadays it is an impressive bulk of masonry with conspicable Franciscan austerity. The facade was finished in 1777, with the plainness and rational pace of Escorial-school architecture, with the entrance porch being the only ornamented part. The cloister is one of the largest in Spain; built by the architect Friar Domingo de Antonio de Puga, and finished after several stages of construction, in which Juan Antonio Escudero also took part. It is made up of galleries arranged around 72 semi-circular arches between pilasters, which border a surface area of over 3300 square metres. This is an enclosure convent, and the only part that can be visited is the church.