Nieuwenhof convent Maastricht University College is housed in a building originally known as the Nieuwenhof convent. In 1482, a group of beguines had a beguinage built in this location right near the second city wall. Its Gothic chapel dates back to the fifteenth century, but the convent buildings are mainly from the seventeenth century. The entrance gate at Zwingelput has a beautiful Louis XV casing. The beguines were pious women who practiced a religious way of life without formerly entering a convent. Still, in the course of the sixteenth century, this community of beguines evolved into a convent of ‘tertiary sisters of Saint Francis’. At the start of the seventeenth century, the Nieuwenhof was a convent where nuns pursued a life of contemplation and praying; providing care to the ill was their only worldly activity. In the French era, the convent was closed, after which, in 1796, it became a Roman Catholic almshouse for poor children who had lost one of their parents. In the late 1800s the Sisters of Charity, locally known as ‘Zusters onder de Bogen’, took charge of the girls’ section. The Nieuwenhof would serve as a children’s home into the 1970s. In 1982, after a major renovation, the university’s Faculty of Law, founded three years before, moved in. In 1988, this Faculty moved to the former government building, after which the former convent began to serve as the operational base of Maastricht University College. The most recent renovation aimed to respect the building’s original features as much as possible. For instance, to preserve the spatial dimensions of the chapel, the lecture hall that now fills the space does so rather loosely – if in reverse direction, facing the rood loft rather than the altar.