Cactus Glass House, Ekamra Kanan Botanical Garden

Ekamra Kanan Botanical Garden is run in Nayapalli by Odisha's Regional Plant Resource Centre (RPRC). The centre's history page dates its founding to 1985 and describes it then as a recreational garden and a "green lung" for Bhubaneswar, which has since become a research organisation recognised by the State and by the Government of India. Wikipedia and Wikidata also give 1985; the area of 500 acres (200 ha) comes from Wikipedia and tourism sites.

Cacti are a specialty of the centre. Its cactus page reports 1,050 species and varieties, "the largest collection of cacti in Asia", plus about 200 varieties or hybrids bred on site through selection, mutagenesis and growth manipulation. The centre also says it has built cactus houses at Rashtrapati Bhavan in New Delhi and at Jeypore in Koraput district.

The official site simply presents it as a "monumental pyramid" holding cacti and succulents. A forum post of July 2025 asks about a glass house project for cacti on which the author could find nothing, not even on the official site: that suggests a recent build, though nothing establishes it.

The written sources are brief: the official site speaks of a "monumental pyramid", the local tourism site of a pyramid-shaped glass house, and neither gives dimensions, a date, a designer or a precise material. In the photographs on the garden's official page, seen from outside, a broad volume on a green-painted steel frame, with almost fully glazed walls, is capped by a pitched roof fitted with translucent panels; a small entrance pavilion with a glazed roof marks the access, and a paved pool with concentric patterns fills the forecourt in front of the façade.

Inside, the green framework, with its central post and triangulated trusses, lets the sky show through the roof, and the transparent walls look out on the garden's trees. The cacti grow in earth beds edged with winding grey concrete borders, linked by steps and paved paths, with small spotlights set at ground level. The outline mapped on OpenStreetMap as "Cactus Glass House" covers about 1,900 m².

The garden's official site speaks of "exotic" cacti and succulents without listing them. The Bhubaneswar tourism site (page updated April 2026) writes that more than a thousand kinds of succulents and cacti are grown in the pyramid-shaped glass house and its surroundings, and a travel guide cites more than 1,050 kinds. The latter figure matches the one on the RPRC's cactus page, which applies it to the centre's entire collection without saying how many of those plants are on show in the glasshouse. The same page also holds a numbered list that stops at 518 names, which does not match 1,050: the figures diverge.

In the photographs of the interior, columnar and globular cacti can be made out, planted in beds. The centre states that no cactus is native to India, a few opuntias and cereus having only naturalised in places.

The glasshouse stands inside Ekamra Kanan Botanical Garden, in Nayapalli, about 7 km from Bhubaneswar railway station according to the local tourism site. On OpenStreetMap it lies about a hundred metres from the ground where the annual flower exhibition is held, organised by the RPRC with the Plant Lovers' Association on the second Saturday and Sunday of January (the 13 January 2024 edition was announced in the press), and about 250 m from the rose garden. Winter therefore combines the exhibition, which the Bhubaneswar city portal places in winter, with the migratory birds of the 45-acre lake, where boating is also offered.

The official site lists nearby the palmetum (54 types of palms), the rose garden (about 1,000 varieties) and the Jagannath Vatika, created in 2015. The garden receives more than two lakh visitors a year.