Legnica Palm House (Palmiarnia Legnicka)

The palm house began as an orangery. In 1855 Legnica's Municipal Park, in what was then a Prussian town in Silesia, gained an orangery and premises for the municipal gardens department behind the rebuilt Shooting House. From 1880 the park hosted a run of horticultural exhibitions, part of whose features were left in place each time. In 1898 the orangery was enlarged into a palm house. Work began in May, paid for by a wealthy townsman, Feodor Beer (Teodor in Polish Wikipedia), at the urging of the Society for the Beautification of the Promenades, which also bought the plants; these arrived from Bordighera in Italy in October. The building was formally opened on 10 December 1898 and handed over to the town, the second structure of its kind in Silesia after the one in Wrocław.

The complex was extended in 1904, 1911 and 1937, and in 1926 it formed part of the first all-German horticultural exhibition, known as GUGALI. After the war the park was only returned to the town in 1947, and the Soviet authorities put the Germans still living there in charge of the planting, the fountains and the palm house. The 1977 flood wrecked the building, which was slowly rebuilt and then renovated around the turn of the 21st century. Added to the heritage register in 2015, the palm house closed in summer 2020 for a staged renovation whose combined cost had passed 14 million złoty by November 2025. In 2021 town councillors complained that 28 animals had died during the works; the town hall put this down to hibernation, old age and disease.

The palm house is a metal-and-glass structure under a 13.1-metre dome, with a volume of 3,180 m³, able to hold plants up to 12 metres tall. It stands on a plot of more than a hectare along White Eagle Avenue (aleja Orła Białego), where a greenhouse, propagation houses, stores and service buildings are grouped around the main pavilion. The heritage register, as recorded in Wikidata, lists the palm house, a warm greenhouse, two cold greenhouses and eastern and western propagation houses as separate monuments.

The works begun in 2020 started with the structure. The first stage, completed in March 2021 for about one million złoty, secured the frame of the main pavilion, replaced the windows, abrasive-blasted the steelwork before giving it an anti-corrosion coating, and re-covered the greenhouse with polycarbonate sheets. The second stage, from October 2021 to mid-2023, cost 3.3 million. The third, funded mainly by the government's Polski Ład programme (8 million of more than 9 million złoty), renews the frame and glazing of the building, with glazing under way from March 2026, upgrades heating, irrigation and lighting, and modernises the cold greenhouse.

Before it closed, the palm house held more than 200 plant species and varieties from several climate zones, tropical, subtropical and Mediterranean, along with cacti. According to Polish Wikipedia, palms, bananas and figs grew alongside an 85-year-old cycad, a Wollemi pine, alocasias, gardenias and strelitzias. The same source mentions a 126-year-old Phoenix palm and a 150-year-old fig; in 2021, however, councillors lamented the loss of a very old palm and a century-old fig, and the town hall replied that the palm, planted in 1976, had rotted and been felled on a tree specialist's advice, while the fig had been removed eight years earlier.

The house also kept animals, chiefly birds such as macaws, cockatoos, lories and other parrots, as well as small monkeys, lizards, turtles and fish. Most of the plants were moved elsewhere during the works. Each summer exotic plants from the palm house are set out among the fountains in the southern part of the park, as they were during the pre-war exhibitions.

The palm house lies in the western part of the Municipal Park (Park Miejski), on White Eagle Avenue, near the Grove of the Muses (Gaj Muz), a former exhibition garden of which a pergola and a pool survive. It remains closed while the works continue: local press reported in March 2026 that they were due to finish in October 2026, while an article from November 2025 spoke of the end of the year. A fourth stage is then meant to recreate an exhibition and education pavilion in the warm and cold greenhouses. Before closing, the building hosted exhibitions, competitions, chamber concerts and educational workshops. A walk can continue to the geometric southern part of the park, with its fountains and flower beds.