Orquidário dos Açores (Azores Orchid House), Faial Botanical Garden

The Faial Botanical Garden was laid out from 1986 by the environmental services of the Azores regional government, on a former farm of the Quinta de São Lourenço, a property of pastures and orange orchards in the Flamengos valley, some 2.5 km from the centre of Horta. It opened to the public that same year and now belongs to the network of environmental centres run by the Faial Natural Park.

The orchid house began with a gift. In 2015 the Finnish Ranta family gave the garden its orchid collection, described at the time as one of the largest private donations the region had ever received: about 7,000 plants of more than 700 kinds. A new building of around 800 m² was planned to hold it. To provide its growing medium, a region-wide drive collected cork stoppers, aiming at 100,000; roughly 55,000 had been handed in by June 2016.

The public tender for enlarging the garden was launched in February 2016. In March 2018 the regional environment directorate announced that the site would grow from 8,000 to about 15,000 m², at a cost of 650,000 euros, including a 900 m² orchid house, a new home for the seed bank and wetland areas. The extension opened in 2019 together with the Orquidário dos Açores, with the regional government putting the final cost at 600,000 euros. The sources consulted differ on the month of the opening, June or late July.

The Azores Orchid House is no glass palace but a working complex, designed by the botanical garden's own staff in partnership with the firm Agrozende. Its orchids are arranged according to their climatic needs. Two heated greenhouses hold species from tropical regions, while two shaded areas and an open-air section take those from temperate zones, so that plants with very different requirements can be shown on a single site.

The 2018 project provided for a 900 m² building, up from the roughly 800 m² mentioned in 2015. The displays draw on the island's own materials: dark and reddish volcanic rock serves as scenery, and the orchids are planted, hung or mounted on supports, as is usual in their cultivation. The growing medium was meant to come from the recycled cork gathered in the 2015-2016 collection campaign. An interpretive exhibition on the orchid family completes the route.

The orchid house holds two collections. The first, some thirty species, had been assembled by the collector Henrique Peixoto (1917-2007) and was passed on by the Santa Casa da Misericórdia of Horta; the second and far larger one belonged to the Ranta family and arrived in 2015 with about 7,000 plants. Wild species and hybrids are grouped by their ecological preferences.

The most talked-about plant is Darwin's orchid, Angraecum sesquipedale, from Madagascar: its form led Charles Darwin to predict a pollinator with an exceptionally long proboscis, which was identified in 1903 and named Xanthopan morganii praedicta. At the opening, the magazine Revista Jardins did note the absence of companion plants such as ferns and bromeliads that would have evoked the orchids' natural habitats.

The orchid house stands in the garden's central site at Flamengos, about 2.5 km from the centre of Horta. A visit can easily take in the other collections on public display: rare and endemic Azorean plants, historic farm crops, medicinal and aromatic plants, the main invasive species, and a permanent exhibition on the natural history of the archipelago's vegetation. The same site houses the Azores Seed Bank, founded in 2003, and a persimmon tree grown from one that survived the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, planted in 2017. The garden's upland site at Pedro Miguel, devoted to laurel forest, is run by the same institution.