In 1579, with the permission of the Bishop of Tortosa, the Dominicans founded a convent outside the walls of Castellón, in the middle of the countryside, next to the Major irrigation channel and the road to the sea. The land was donated by the jurist Jaime Miralles, and at his request the building was dedicated to Saint Thomas Aquinas, although in time the people of Castellón came to know it as the Convent del Roser, after the Rosary confraternity linked to the friars. The beginnings were modest: half a dozen religious figures, a precarious economy, and construction work that advanced at the pace of alms and aid from the municipal council.

The church, today the parish of San Vicente Ferrer, reflects this slow growth well. Its nave with lateral chapels was completed throughout the seventeenth century, and irregularities in mouldings, vaults and decoration of the chapels reveal the pauses in the work. Between 1661 and 1668 the bell tower was built, which by the mid-nineteenth century housed an optical telegraph. Around 1690 the confraternity funded the Rosary chapel, whose frescoes, completed by Eugenio Guilló in 1704, are the most valuable artistic ensemble in the temple. In several chapels the ornamental sgrafitto from the mid-seventeenth century is also preserved.

The cloister was begun in 1648 by master builder Joan Ibáñez, an Aragonese settled in Vila-real with numerous commissions in the region, and was completed around 1659. It is the only one of his works that has survived to the present day. Its language is Renaissance at a time when Baroque was already gaining ground: arches on columns raised on pedestals, almost non-existent ornamentation and proportions that scholars relate to the cloister of the Corpus Christi College in Valencia. Here, beauty lies in rhythm and measure, not in ornamentation.

The complex barely survived the nineteenth century. In 1811 French troops expelled the friars and reused wood, bricks and stone from the convent; only the columns of the cloister remained standing. After disentailment, the Town Council obtained the building to install the House of Charity, which from 1860 was managed by the Provincial Council with the Sisters of Consolation and which came to house hundreds of orphans and elderly people. In the nineteen-eighties the Provincial Council closed the institution and demolished its pavilions, but respected the cloister, which remained as the central courtyard of the Music Conservatory, amongst the educational and cultural facilities built on the old convent lands.