The Best Greenhouses to Visit in Europe
The Old Continent invented the modern botanical greenhouse: from the Victorian workshops of Kew to contemporary Scandinavian biomes, Verrière currently catalogues 166 greenhouses here, across 59 countries. Here's where to find them, region by region.
Northern Europe — the British Isles, Scandinavia, the Baltics
The UK and Ireland hold the continent's highest density of historic greenhouses, a direct legacy of the Victorian golden age of plant-hunting horticulture. Further north, Scandinavia and the Baltic states developed their own winter gardens, designed to make the tropics accessible through harsh winters.
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Curvilinear Range & Great Palm House
🇮🇪 Glasnevin, Dublin, Ireland · 1843–1869 · Palm House 1883
The dome of the same Richard Turner who designed Kew's Palm House.
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Chatsworth Display Greenhouse
🇬🇧 Bakewell (Derbyshire), United Kingdom ·
It holds direct descendants of the bananas and giant water lily that Joseph Paxton grew here in the nineteenth century.
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Eden Project
🇬🇧 Bodelva, Cornwall, United Kingdom · 2001
A dead clay pit reborn as a rainforest under bubbles.
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Edvard Anderssons växthus
🇸🇪 Bergianska trädgården, Stockholm, Sweden · 1995
Glass walls that seem to float above five Mediterranean climates.
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Great Glasshouse
🇬🇧 National Botanic Garden of Wales, Llanarthne, United Kingdom · 2000
Set on the Welsh hillside like a giant raindrop, this dome brings together six Mediterranean-climate regions of the world.
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Kibble Palace
🇬🇧 Glasgow, United Kingdom · 1873
A travelling Victorian glasshouse: built on the shores of Loch Long, it was dismantled and shipped by barge to Glasgow's botanic gardens.
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Oranžerija du Jardin botanique de Kaunas
🇱🇹 Kaunas, Lithuania · 1923–1925
The president of the young Republic of Lithuania personally laid the cornerstone of this orangery, which went on to become the country's largest greenhouse.
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Palm House
🇬🇧 Kew, London, United Kingdom · 1844–1848
The technical cradle of every great glasshouse that followed.
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Palm House
🇬🇧 Botanic Gardens, Belfast, United Kingdom · 1852
One of the oldest surviving examples of a curvilinear cast-iron glasshouse, whitewashed every summer to protect the plants.
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Palmehuset
🇳🇴 Tøyen Botanical Garden, Oslo, Norway · 1868
Oslo's oldest palm tree grew here for nearly two centuries.
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Palmehuset
🇩🇰 University of Copenhagen Botanical Garden, Denmark · 1874
Inspired by the Crystal Palace, this glass palace houses a palm planted as early as 1824.
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Palmimaja du Jardin botanique de Tallinn
🇪🇪 Tallinn, Estonia · 1999 · renovated 2021
Designed by two figures of Estonian postmodern architecture, this glass tower was once a nominee for best concrete-and-glass building of the year.
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Palmu māja, University of Latvia Botanical Garden
🇱🇻 Riga, Latvia · 1972 · renovated 2025
A palm tree given in 1939 by national composer Jāzeps Vītols still grows beneath the renovated glasshouse of the largest tropical complex in the Baltic states.
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Palmusali (Kaisaniemen kasvitieteellinen puutarha)
🇫🇮 Kaisaniemi Botanical Garden, Helsinki, Finland · 1889
The glass palace was reborn from seeds frozen through the bombing raids.
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Randers Regnskov (Tropical Zoo)
🇩🇰 Randers, Denmark · 1990
A zoo built entirely under glass domes, devoted to the tropical forests of Asia, Africa and America
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Sefton Park Palm House
🇬🇧 Sefton Park, Liverpool, United Kingdom · 1896
Funded by a local benefactor, this Victorian greenhouse survived the bombing of the Second World War.
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Sheffield Winter Garden
🇬🇧 Sheffield, United Kingdom · 2003
One of the largest temperate urban glasshouses built in Europe in a century, framed entirely in glue-laminated larch.
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Temperate House
🇬🇧 Kew, London, United Kingdom · 1860–1899
The largest Victorian glasshouse ever built.
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Victoriahuset
🇸🇪 Bergianska trädgården, Stockholm, Sweden · 1899–1900
A cast-iron dome built for a single royal flower.
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Western Europe — France, the Low Countries, the German-speaking world
France, Belgium and the Netherlands each have their own tradition of winter gardens and royal greenhouses, often tied to a historic estate. Germany and Austria, meanwhile, hold some of Europe's richest catalogues thanks to their large university and zoological botanical gardens.
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Wilhelma Amazon House
🇩🇪 Stuttgart, Germany · 1999
A forest path runs through a recreated Amazon rainforest where some twenty bird species fly free.
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Burgers' Bush
🇳🇱 Burgers' Zoo, Arnhem, Netherlands · 1988
The first fully enclosed rainforest at this scale, since imitated by zoos around the world.
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Edenya
🇧🇪 Pairi Daiza, Brugelette, Belgium · 2026
Opened in 2026, the world's largest tropical greenhouse houses hippopotamuses, jaguars and manatees under glass.
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Gondwanaland
🇩🇪 Leipzig Zoo, Germany · 2011
Europe's largest tropical hall, where you cross the jungle by canoe in the heart of Saxony.
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Grandes Serres du Jardin des Plantes
🇫🇷 Paris, France · 1833–1836
The secret backdrop for the imagined jungles painted by Henri Rousseau, the 'Douanier'.
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Great Glasshouses of the Parc de la Tête d'Or
🇫🇷 Lyon, France · 1877–1880
Nicknamed the 'cathedral of glass and steel', they hold a cycad planted at the 1883 opening — the botanical garden's oldest resident.
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Großes Tropenhaus
🇩🇪 Berlin-Dahlem Botanical Garden, Germany · 1907
A permanent equatorial microclimate since 1907.
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Jardin des Serres d'Auteuil
🇫🇷 Paris, France · 1895–1898
Still produces 100,000 plants a year for Paris's public buildings.
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Masoala-Halle
🇨🇭 Zurich, Switzerland · 2001–2003
An entire Madagascan rainforest under a single arched roof.
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Karlsaue Orangery
🇩🇪 Kassel, Germany · 1701–1739
A princely orangery that served as both a summer residence and a citrus house.
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Orangery of the Palace of Versailles
🇫🇷 Versailles, France · 1684–1686
The largest orangery in Europe in the late seventeenth century, built to shelter more than a thousand of Louis XIV's orange trees.
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Palmengarten
🇩🇪 Frankfurt am Main, Germany · 1869–1871
Founded by former court gardeners turned entrepreneurs.
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Palmenhaus Schönbrunn
🇦🇹 Vienna, Austria · 1881–1882
45,000 panes of glass for three climates under a single roof.
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Burggarten Palmenhaus
🇦🇹 Vienna, Austria · 1901–1905
An art nouveau glasshouse built for the imperial court, now divided between a restaurant, a butterfly house and a public glasshouse.
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Palmenkas (Hortus Botanicus Amsterdam)
🇳🇱 Amsterdam, Netherlands · 1911–1912
An Art Nouveau jewel built to keep a brilliant botanist from leaving.
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Regenwaldhaus
🇦🇹 Tiergarten Schönbrunn (Vienna Zoo), Austria · 2002
An Asian rainforest slope recreated under glass, at the heart of the world's oldest zoo.
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Regenwaldhaus
🇩🇪 Krefeld Zoo, Krefeld, Germany · 1998
At Krefeld Zoo, a barrier-free tropical greenhouse where animals roam freely
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Serres Royales de Laeken
🇧🇪 Brussels, Belgium · 1874–1905
Open to the public for only a few weeks each year, in spring.
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Victoriakas (Hortus Botanicus Leiden)
🇳🇱 Leiden, Netherlands · 1870 · rebuilt 1937
Beneath a cast-iron crown, giant water lilies have reigned since 1870.
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Wintertuin (Jardin d'hiver)
🇧🇪 Antwerp Zoo, Belgium · 1897
The winter garden of the world's oldest zoo, where tropical butterflies sometimes flutter beneath a 19th-century glass roof.
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Southern Europe — the Iberian peninsula and Italy
Under milder latitudes, Spain, Portugal and Italy needed greenhouses less to grow exotic species — which makes their historic glasshouses, often tied to a royal palace or park, all the more remarkable.
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Estufa Fria
🇵🇹 Lisbon, Portugal · 1933
A greenhouse without a single pane of glass, built inside an abandoned quarry.
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Great Glasshouse, Coimbra Botanical Garden
🇵🇹 Coimbra, Portugal · 1859–1866
One of the earliest examples of iron architecture in Portugal, restored and reopened after decades of partial closure.
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Giardino della Biodiversità
🇮🇹 Padua, Italy · 2014
Five biomes under glass, in the world's oldest university botanical garden.
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Hivernacle del Parc de la Ciutadella
🇪🇸 Barcelona, Spain · 1888
A cathedral of cast iron and glass born for the 1888 Universal Exposition, brought back to life in 2023.
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Palacio de Cristal
🇪🇸 Retiro Park, Madrid, Spain · 1887
A colonial-era greenhouse turned cathedral of contemporary art.
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Serra Carolina (Giardino d'Inverno)
🇮🇹 Palermo, Italy · 1823
A gift from Queen Maria Carolina in 1823, this winter garden shelters coffee trees and papaya trees beneath the Sicilian sky.
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Central and Eastern Europe
This is the region classic guidebooks cover least — and yet one of the best documented in our catalogue, with large university botanical greenhouses often inherited from the Soviet era and now restored.
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Klimatron, Fomin Botanical Garden
🇺🇦 Kyiv, Ukraine · 1960s–1978
In the depths of the Kyiv winter, a century-old palm grows until it touches the glass roof of this Soviet climatron — Ukraine's oldest palm, about 200 years old.
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Cluj-Napoca Botanical Garden Glasshouses
🇷🇴 Cluj-Napoca, Romania · 1960
A Canary Island date palm more than 145 years old grows in the palm house, beside an East African oil palm.
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Palm House, Peter the Great Botanical Garden
🇷🇺 Saint Petersburg, Russia · 1896–1898
Bombed during the Siege of Leningrad, the greenhouse saved only a handful of plants out of its thousands of species — it now shelters more than 7,500.
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Gliwice Municipal Palm House
🇵🇱 Gliwice, Poland · 1880
Three Canary Island date palms planted for the 1924 exhibition still grow under the same roof, through two complete rebuilds.
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Palmiarnia Poznańska
🇵🇱 Poznań, Poland · 1910–1911 · rebuilt 1992
60% destroyed by World War II bombing, Poland's largest greenhouse was rebuilt without ever losing its living collections.
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Zielona Góra Palm House
🇵🇱 Zielona Góra, Poland · 1961
Built over nineteenth-century wine cellars, it holds a Canary Island date palm counted among the tallest grown under glass in Europe.
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Palmiarnia w Wałbrzychu
🇵🇱 Wałbrzych, Poland · 1913
A princely 1911-1913 greenhouse lined with volcanic tuff from Etna, at the foot of Książ Castle.
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Łódź Palm House
🇵🇱 Łódź, Poland ·
Nearly 4,500 specimens across more than 1,100 taxa grow in the historic Źródliska park, in central Łódź.
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Pálmaház du Füvészkert de Budapest
🇭🇺 Budapest, Hungary · 1865
Hungary's only “Victoria house” since 1865, immortalized in The Paul Street Boys.
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Pálmaház du zoo de Budapest
🇭🇺 Budapest, Hungary · 1909–1912
Originally designed for a separate urban project on Gellért Hill, the greenhouse ended up housing Budapest Zoo's miniature jungle.
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Rastlinjak, Ljubljana Botanical Garden
🇸🇮 Ljubljana, Slovenia · 1955
The first greenhouse at the Ljubljana Botanical Garden, born in 1955 out of postwar reconstruction.
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Sera Veche, Bucharest Botanical Garden
🇷🇴 Bucharest, Romania · 1889–1891
Modeled on the glasshouses of Liège, which were destroyed in 1944 and no longer exist, Bucharest's Sera Veche has become their sole surviving example anywhere in the world.
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Serre Fata Morgana
🇨🇿 Prague Botanical Garden, Troja, Czech Republic · 2004
Three climates and a 6-meter waterfall along a single path.
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Palm Greenhouse, Aptekarsky Ogorod
🇷🇺 Moscow, Russia · 1891
Russia's oldest botanical garden shelters, beneath its glasshouse, a cycad over two centuries old, brought back around 1807.
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Comenius University Botanical Garden Tropical House
🇸🇰 Bratislava, Slovakia ·
On the banks of the Danube, seven hectares of garden hold a glasshouse where palms, cacti and orchids grow side by side.
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Central Siberian Botanical Garden Glasshouses
🇷🇺 Novosibirsk (Akademgorodok), Russia · 1972
More than 7,000 species, forms and varieties of tropical and subtropical plants grow in glasshouses built when the garden moved to Akademgorodok.
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Yerevan Botanical Garden Glasshouses
🇦🇲 Yerevan, Armenia · 1935
More than 670 tropical and subtropical species grow under glass, including avocado trees and orchids from Japan, China and Mexico.
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Chișinău National Botanical Garden Glasshouses
🇲🇩 Chișinău, Moldova · 1951
Badly damaged by a storm in April 2017, the garden has since rebuilt its tropical collections under glass.
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Serres tropicales du Jardin botanique de Liberec
🇨🇿 Liberec, Czech Republic · 1996–2000
The Czech Republic's oldest botanical garden (1895) gained, a century later, the country's most singular greenhouse complex, its footprint mimicking a cluster of crystals.
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Staklenik du Jardin botanique Jevremovac
🇷🇸 Belgrade, Serbia · 1892
A personal gift from King Milan Obrenović to his botanical garden, the Jevremovac greenhouse has stood watch in the heart of Belgrade since 1892.
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Staklenik, Zagreb Botanical Garden
🇭🇷 Zagreb, Croatia · 1891
Zagreb's greenhouse began as a marine aquarium before becoming, a century later, a jungle of palms in the heart of the city.
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Old Orangery, Łazienki Park
🇵🇱 Warsaw, Poland · 1785–1788
The east wing of this neoclassical orangery still houses the court theatre built for Stanisław II August, opened on 6 September 1788.
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Greenhouse Complex, Central Botanical Garden of Belarus
🇧🇾 Minsk, Belarus · 2007
A glass octagon where rainforest, African succulents and citrus trees have coexisted since 2007.
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Оранжерея Ботанічного саду Львівського університету
🇺🇦 Lviv, Ukraine · 1974
Beneath a 24-meter glass roof, a century-old Canary Island date palm and monkey puzzle tree have survived the winters of war.
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Оранжерея Московского зоопарка
🇷🇺 Moscow, Russia · 2012
A glass rotunda at the heart of Moscow Zoo, devoted to the tallest tropical trees, built in 2012.
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166 botanical and historic greenhouses, across 59 countries, organized by continent in the complete catalogue.
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