Display glasshouses (Tropenhaus) of the University of Würzburg Botanical Garden

The Würzburg botanical garden was founded on 6 August 1696 by Prince-Bishop Johann Gottfried von Guttenberg in the grounds of the Juliusspital, in the city centre. Its first glasshouse was built there in 1722, when J. B. A. Beringer and L. A. Dercum ran the garden. After several stages, the garden moved between 1855 and 1859 to university land.

The present site was laid out from 1960 on the slope of a former clay pit along the Mittlerer Dallenbergweg, south of Würzburg; the new garden, covering about 9 hectares, was formally opened in the summer of 1971. The sources consulted give neither the construction date of the display glasshouses on this site nor the name of their designer.

For the Free State of Bavaria, the Staatliches Bauamt Würzburg completed in 2016 the 'Kopfbau Botanik', a replacement building that serves as the entrance to the display glasshouses, with an approved budget of 7.5 million euros; twenty-one firms took part, nineteen of them from Bavaria. In 2022 a Würzburg agency surveyed the Tropenhaus with a laser scanner and digitised it to offer a virtual visit, the first step in a planned digitisation of the whole garden.

The garden has about 2,500 m² under glass. The tropical houses form a set of six sections linked in a circular route; propagation houses closed to the public stand in the same complex. Two separate houses complete the facilities: the Mediterranean house and the mountain-plant house with its alpine garden.

The entrance was rebuilt in 2016 as a single-storey building designed by the Staatliches Bauamt Würzburg with the glasshouse builder Uwe Schaarschmidt GmbH; the Walch + Och practice handled the structural engineering and the Wölfel practice the building physics. Its deliberately low height leaves the gable fronts of the neighbouring glasshouses in view and clearly marks the end of the garden's main path. This barrier-free reception hall also hosts temporary exhibitions.

The tropical circuit begins with lowland rainforest and continues through montane cloud forest, paired with Macaronesian laurel forest. Two sections of xerophytes follow: one devoted to the arid regions of Africa and Madagascar, the other to those of South and Central America and the southern part of North America. A flower corridor, with aquariums according to Wikipedia, shows changing collections, and a final section groups tropical and subtropical useful plants by their uses.

The Mediterranean house and the mountain-plant house extend the visit to other climates. The garden as a whole grows some 10,000 species from every continent, arranged by vegetation zone and natural habitat.

The garden, about 9 hectares, lies on the slope of a former clay pit south of the city centre, at Julius-von-Sachs-Platz 4. The tropical circuit takes about an hour. The entrance hall regularly hosts exhibitions, guided tours can be arranged on request and virtual tours are available online. Outdoors, the walk can continue to the Mediterranean rocky heath, the North American prairies, the Tertiary forest, the Siebold plants, the medicinal plant garden, the farm garden and the peony collection.