Tropicario of the Bogotá Botanical Garden

Bogotá Botanical Garden was founded on 6 August 1955 by the botanist and priest Enrique Pérez Arbeláez and is named after the naturalist José Celestino Mutis. It specialises in Andean and páramo ecosystems and is the largest botanical garden in Colombia.

The Tropicario grew out of an architectural competition won by the Colombian practice DARP – De Arquitectura y Paisaje, led by Jaime Eduardo Cabal and Jorge Emilio Buitrago, with a concept called 'ecotono', which set out to make urban and environmental logics work together. The practice dates the project 2015–2022; the garden gives 2021 as the inauguration year, while the catalogue has 2020.

The project has collected a string of awards: a prize at the Quito Biennial in 2020, the landscape prize of the Buenos Aires Biennial in 2022, a place among the finalists for the Oscar Niemeyer Prize that year, and two Steel Pencil awards in 2023, for architecture and for sustainability.

The building is conceived as a circuit of glasshouses linked in sequence. The architects give a total of about 3,700 m²; the garden describes six glass domes over 2,700 m², five for living collections and one for temporary exhibitions, and bills it as the largest greenhouse in South America.

The volumes rise from a platform designed as a constructed wetland, a transitional zone that recalls the lake origins of the Bogotá plateau. The interior climate relies heavily on passive systems: changes in ground level, airlocks and glazed facades maintain distinct temperature, light and humidity in each house. Rainwater is collected and reused together with the rest of the garden. The circuit was set among some seventy wax palms (Ceroxylon quindiuense).

Each house recreates the bioclimatic conditions of a Colombian habitat. The route runs from the superpáramo, the high mountain zone where rivers are born, to the humid tropical forest of the Chocó and the Amazon, then to the tropical dry forest of the Alta Guajira and the inter-Andean valleys of the Cauca and Magdalena.

One section is devoted to useful plants and their roles in food, medicine and textiles, another to species under conservation programmes. The Tropicario is a working facility as well as a display: threatened species are researched and propagated on site.

Visits are led by environmental educators in groups of up to twenty, with guides available in English and French. Children and young people take part in activities before and after the tour.

The Tropicario pairs naturally with the rest of the garden, whose collections are grouped by native ecosystem, with a strong focus on Andean and páramo habitats. Walking from the cold of the superpáramo into the humid heat of the Chocó conveys, within a few metres, the range of Colombia's climates.