Quinta Normal Glasshouse

The Quinta Normal glasshouse is dated by its style: around 1865 according to Chile's National Monuments Council. It first stood at the Quinta Meiggs, the Santiago residence of the American railway builder Henry Meiggs, on the Alameda between Avenida España and Avenida República. Its prefabricated parts are thought to have been ordered from France, given their likeness to French iron-and-glass work.

Once it passed to the Chilean state, it was moved in 1890 to the Quinta Normal de Agricultura, an estate founded in 1841 with a botanical garden since 1853, to serve as the Botanical Garden's Exotic Plant Observatory. After the last director left in 1922, maintenance stopped and the plants were lost.

From 1989 to 1995 a project involving Caritas Chile, the Municipality of Santiago and the National Museum of Natural History turned it into a medicinal plant conservatory, after which it was abandoned again. Declared a Historic Monument by Decree No. 279 of 17 July 2009, it became the subject of a municipal plan approved by the National Monuments Council in 2016: a first phase of clearance and fencing, then a second, estimated at 1.5 billion pesos, adding an underground level with an exhibition hall, auditorium and café. Promised for 2018, the scheme was reported frozen in 2019.

The building combines prefabricated wrought-iron and glass elements, including coloured panes of ornamental value, set on a stone base. Its elongated plan centres on a domed volume flanked by two symmetrical basilica-plan wings.

The National Monuments Council places it within nineteenth-century French structural ironwork, with Victorian touches and hints of the coming Art Nouveau. Decades of neglect have left the structure badly deteriorated, which is why the municipality has been studying its restoration since 2010.

The glasshouse no longer holds a collection. According to the National Monuments Council, the Meiggs family's botanical garden passed to the Chilean state with all its plants, and the glasshouse was designed to house, study and display those species, which could not survive Santiago's climate. As the permanent home of the Exotic Plant Observatory, or Conservatory, it gradually lost its plants after 1922 until the collection had disappeared entirely.

The 1989–1995 interlude gave it a new role as a medicinal plant conservatory. In 2016 the neighbourhood group EcoBarrio Yugay organised volunteer days and planted a community vegetable garden inside, until the site was closed at the end of that year pending works. The glasshouse is now a ruin.

The glasshouse stands in the south-eastern corner of Parque Quinta Normal, not far from the National Museum of Natural History and the Matucana 100 cultural centre. According to the latest published reports it remained fenced off and closed to the public, so it can only be seen from outside.

The park, about 35 hectares, easily fills half a day: it is home to the National Museum of Natural History, the science and technology museum, a branch of the Museum of Contemporary Art and Santiago's railway museum.