Spanish nuns recruit novices through YouTube

For the 11 remaining "Barefoot Carmelite" nuns at the San Jose convent in Ecija, near the southern Spanish city of Seville, the future looked grim.

No young novices had joined the convent for three years and, as is happening in convents all over Spain, their numbers were dwindling so fast as the elder ones died that it looked as though it may have to close after almost 400 years.

Now the nuns have found salvation by breaking out of their cloistered world with the help of internet video site YouTube.

The convent's mother superior, Mother Isabel, was persuaded by friends that the best way to recruit new nuns would be to put up a video on YouTube to show how life was lived inside Ecija's 14th-century Mudéjar palace-turned-convent.

Thousands of YouTube visits later, not only has the phone been ringing almost continuously, but the first new novice has walked through the doors after seeing the video online.

"These days there are very few people who know what it is like to be a cloistered nun," explained Mother Isabel. "If the rest of the world is on the internet, then why shouldn't we be there, too?"

The video shows footage of the nuns praying, sewing and baking cakes, while a series of uplifting messages tell viewers about the joys of a cloistered existence.