Tropicana Greenhouse, Teplice Botanical Garden (skleník Tropicana)

The land occupied by Teplice Botanical Garden was already being used for horticulture about a century before the garden was founded. Plans of 1904 label it as the municipal nursery (Stadtgärtnerei), and the garden mentions a possible role for Prince Edmund Clary-Aldringen in its origins, though this is not established. The original glasshouses served the spa town, growing cut flowers and sheltering palms through the winter.

In the early 1970s these glasshouses were rebuilt under Marie Sternthalová (1948-2024), who ran the site from 1971 and secured its opening to the public. In March 1975 it became the Teplice Supply and Collection Garden (Zásobní a sbírková zahrada), part of the town's technical services.

On 1 January 2002 the town made it an independent botanical garden, the first in the Ústí nad Labem Region, with an inherited stock of about 2,000 species. A building programme followed. Supply glasshouses of 1,750 m², closed to the public, were completed in December 2003; the large display greenhouse, begun in the second half of 2004, was finished in December 2005, planted mostly in 2006 and officially opened on 1 May 2007. Expeditions to Chile between 2010 and 2015 then enriched the collections, and the alpine house, under construction from 2018, opened on 15 June 2021. In 2024 the garden gained accreditation from Botanic Gardens Conservation International (BGCI).

The Tropicana is a single building in which three glazed sections follow one another behind an entrance hall called the Entrada. It covers 2,400 m², of which 2,100 m² are planted, and the garden ranks it among the largest and tallest display greenhouses in the country. Each section stands for a broad group of habitats: the xerophytic house for deserts, semi-deserts, savannas and dry tropical forests, the tropical house, and the subtropical house, devoted to montane cloud forests and evergreen temperate forests.

The interior is strongly staged. The tropical section has a waterfall and a raised walkway over its palaeotropical part, the dry section a Mexican pueblo, and the subtropical section a reconstruction of brown-coal formation that shows the landscape of the region 20 million years ago, in the Miocene. The hall displays stalactites from Vietnam, a ceramic piece by the sculptor Milan Žofka, Dragons in Storm Clouds, and an aviary of Australian birds. With the alpine house, the display glasshouses now total some 2,700 m²; the 1,750 m² of supply glasshouses remain closed to visitors.

The xerophytic house brings together plants from Central and South America, southern Africa and Madagascar, grouped by geographical origin. Cacti are represented in particular by the genera Mammillaria, Echinocereus and Ferocactus, alongside other succulents, trees and shrubs. Panels in the tropical section point out that the tropics cover only about 2 per cent of the Earth's surface yet hold up to half of all living species, while the subtropical section gathers plants of cloud forests and evergreen temperate forests.

The garden's speciality is the flora of Chile. Enlarged by the expeditions of 2010 to 2015, this collection numbers nearly 600 species and is regarded as the largest in Europe. It takes pride of place in the alpine house, which is devoted to high-mountain zones and above all to South American flora.

The garden lies in the spa district of Šanov, close to Písečný vrch hill and the Janáčkovy sady park. The Tropicana, open all year, is the heart of the visit: allow an hour to an hour and a half for the hall and the four houses, longer with the outdoor garden of about 1.5 hectares, whose paths are laid with old Teplice paving stones and which includes a small pond. On a cold day, walking through the tropical and subtropical sections makes a vivid contrast with the season outside. The visit extends naturally into a walk through the parks of the spa town.