Orquideario, Chapultepec Botanical Garden

Chapultepec has a long botanical pedigree: the Fideicomiso Pro Bosque de Chapultepec notes that in the time of Nezahualcóyotl the forest already held what it describes as the country's first botanical garden. For the twentieth century, the park's official account traces the origins of the garden and its greenhouse to 1919 and the work of the Directorate of Biological Studies headed by Alfonso Luis Herrera. The present greenhouse, a metal structure decorated with azulejo tiles and art deco stained glass, is dated to the 1950s by a 2018 Local.mx article and to the 1940s by another from 2019; none of the sources consulted names its builder. According to MXC magazine, the greenhouses previously belonged to the botanical garden of a university biology institute.

The current botanical garden was inaugurated in 2006, and the orquideario opened the same year. From 2016 the non-profit Plantando con Causa, backed by the Fideicomiso Pro Bosque, restored 22 areas with landscape designers, botanists, horticulturists and biologists, then reworked the garden again for the 2018 Flores y Jardines festival.

In 2019 the Pabellón Contemporáneo Mexicano, then assigned to Renzo Piano, was set to demolish the orquideario and move the garden to the park's second section. Folded into the Chapultepec: Naturaleza y Cultura programme, with the artist Gabriel Orozco as conceptual lead, and later awarded to the architect Alejandro Sánchez García, the 1,800 m² pavilion was challenged in court by a citizens' group: on 18 November 2022 a federal judge ordered that the site be kept as it stood. The greenhouse was still open to the public in January 2025.

The orquideario is a metal-framed greenhouse of about 500 m², according to Local.mx. Its vocabulary is art deco: the rooms are roofed with barrel vaults and spherical domes filled with stained glass, while azulejo tiles and mosaics in the same style complete the decoration. The tall glazing floods with light an interior given over to tropical plants.

The greenhouse is one of the oldest spaces in a garden otherwise made up of open-air beds reworked during the recent restorations: a xerophytic garden, the Tlalocan wetland inspired by the canals of Xochimilco, a pollinator garden, a chilli garden, a garden for grasshoppers (chapulines), a kitchen garden and an arboretum. The sources consulted give neither the dimensions of the domes nor details of the climate equipment, and they disagree on the decade of construction.

The greenhouse is above all an orchid house. Local.mx reports an important collection that includes endangered species and even one described as extinct; MXC mentions at least 200 orchid specimens in the garden, alongside bromeliads and other tropical plants, and a guide published in 2025 counts more than 50 tropical species under glass.

Around the greenhouse, the garden gathers more than 300 species and varieties in themed beds: plants for pollinators, edible plants, succulents, wetland plants, 14 species of wild dahlia, agaves and cacti, some of them more than ten metres tall. The arboretum keeps ahuehuetes (Montezuma cypresses) more than 300 years old, among the oldest trees in the garden.

The botanical garden opens onto Paseo de la Reforma in the first section of Chapultepec Park, across from the Museo Tamayo; the orquideario stands inside its grounds. The greenhouse closes earlier than the outdoor beds, so it is best to start the visit there. An hour is enough to see the glasshouse and then the themed gardens, which since the 2018 renovation have had guide paths for visually impaired visitors. The visit combines easily with the museums and the lake of the park's first section. As the pavilion project remained pending before the courts, it is wise to check that the greenhouse is accessible before going.