Benalmádena Butterfly Park (Mariposario de Benalmádena, now Monowa)

The Benalmádena butterfly park opened in 2011 on land that the town council made available to the project. It was promoted by Imago Dracaena S.L., a small company formed by an entrepreneur and a veterinarian, and at its launch the Andalusian press presented it as the largest zoo in Europe devoted to butterflies, on a site of 2,000 square metres. Spanish Wikipedia gives 25 March 2011 as the opening date, while the press reports on the inauguration appeared at the end of May and on 1 June 2011.

The Thai idiom of the building was a deliberate choice. It echoes the neighbouring Enlightenment Stupa, a Buddhist monument, and Spanish Wikipedia also links it to the long Asian history of rearing Lepidoptera, which began in China some 4,000 years ago with silk production before spreading to Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia.

From the outset the site combined display with production: according to the figures released in 2011, around 70 per cent of the butterflies in flight were bred on site and the remaining 30 per cent imported. In November 2025 the park adopted the name Monowa, unveiled on 7 November at an event called the Jornada de la Metamorfosis. The name draws on the Japanese notion of mono no aware, a sensitivity to the fleeting beauty of life and nature. The relaunch came with a renovation that added breeding areas visible to the public, an interactive exhibit called My Butterfly, and improvements to landscaping, signage and accessibility.

The building is designed in Thai style. Much of its construction material and decoration was imported directly from Thailand, and the pagoda-like entrance is faced with blue tiles made specially for the project in Chiang Mai. Behind this ornamental front lies the working core of the park: a glazed tropical garden of more than 900 square metres under a roof about eight metres high, within a complex of some 2,000 square metres in all.

The flight hall is run as a humid tropical environment, held between 24 and 28 °C with relative humidity of roughly 80 per cent. A separate pupa room, the pupario, is laid out so that visitors can watch adult butterflies emerging from their chrysalises. The building stands on Calle Muérdago, about a hundred metres from the stupa whose architectural vocabulary it borrows.

Butterflies are the heart of the collection. According to the park, between 1,800 and 2,000 tropical butterflies fly in the garden every day, belonging to more than 40 species from nine countries; the figures announced at the opening spoke of 1,500 to 2,000 butterflies and of more than 150 species over the course of a year. The pupae come from sustainable breeding farms in Costa Rica, Panama, Ecuador, El Salvador, Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia, Belize and Kenya, complementing the rearing carried out on site.

The butterflies share the garden with other animals: the park mentions birds, fish, turtles and stick insects, and Spanish Wikipedia also lists iguanas and a Tammar wallaby. The pupario, where emergences take place in full view of the public, remains one of the high points of a visit.

The park stands on Calle Muérdago in Benalmádena, right beside the Enlightenment Stupa, so the two sites combine easily in a single outing. The park itself reckons that a visit takes between 45 and 90 minutes. Because the flight hall is kept warm and humid all year round, it can be visited in any season; in winter light clothing under a coat is sensible, since the temperature inside stays between 24 and 28 °C. The pupario rewards a slow pace, as emergences happen in front of visitors.