A sacred landscape is a subjective, perceivable part of the landscape, composed of symbols, meanings, and understandings, depending on the cultural context. To describe the landscape is to grasp it as a mental layer of human knowledge laid over the physical surface. A landscape is a memory that contains remnants of land uses and recollections of power relations in the past. It bears narratives transmitted through generations that determine the identity of a landscape or a place.The Cistercian Order (1098) calls for a return to St. Benedict’s precepts of prayer and physical labour (ora et labora). Churches were built in distant valleys in a pure, rational style for isolation and self-sufficiency, focusing on poverty, work, and stillness.As an enclosed religious-cultural space, the abbey walls were reinforced with watchtowers to protect the monastery, where the inside met the outside world. The monastery was a prefiguration of Heavenly Jerusalem; the walls represented protection, refuge, and a promise of serenity to ensure sacredness. Fleeing the forests, the monastics sought aloneness with God. Monasteries drew sustenance and meaning from the surrounding landscape and stood on the liminal threshold between paradise-garden and desert-wilderness.Questions arise about how monks and laypeople perceive-interpret culture and nature when performing ora et labora: (1) a physical contrast: monks’ prayer in inner-sacred and laypeople’s manual work in outer-profane spaces; and (2) a cognitive mindset: monks’ special work in outer and laypeople's prayer in inner spaces. The notion of semiosphere allows a shift of centre-periphery and centre-alienness through perceptions-interpretations.