Real Jardín Botánico de Madrid (Spanish for “Royal Botanical Garden of Madrid”) is an 8 hectares (20 acres) botanical garden in Madrid (Spain). The public entrance is located at Plaza de Murillo, next to the Prado Museum.
In 1942 the garden was given the heritage listing Artistic Garden. In 1974, after decades of hardship and neglect, the garden was closed to the public for restoration work to its original plan. It reopened in 1981. In the 21st century it became part of a World Heritage Site, “Paseo del Prado and Buen Retiro, a landscape of Arts and Sciences”.
Today’s garden is divided into seven major outdoor sections and five greenhouses which allow the cultivation of species which are not suited to Madrid’s Continental Mediterranean climate. Total collections include about 90,000 plants and flowers, and 1,500 trees.
Terraza de los Cuadros – collections of ornamental plants, medicinal, aromatic, endemic and orchard gathered around a small fountain. All are planted in box-edged plots. At its southwestern end is a Japanese garden.
Terraza de las Escuelas Botánicas – a taxonomic collection of plants, ordered phylogenetically and set within plots about 12 small fountains.
Terraza del Plano de la Flor – a diverse collection of trees and shrubs, as designed in the mid-nineteenth century in the romantic English style. It contains the Villanueva Pavilion, built in 1781 as a greenhouse, and a pond with bust of Carl Linnaeus.
The garden’s two greenhouses are divided into four rooms. The Graëlls greenhouse dates from the nineteenth century and exhibits tropical plants and bryophytes. The newer structure supports three climates: tropical, temperate, and desert.
The herbarium is the largest in Spain and now contains over a million specimens from around the world. The oldest material consists of plants collected during scientific expeditions undertaken in the 18th and 19th centuries. As of 2016, the online herbarium’s databases contained detailed information about all the specimens in the algae, bryophyte, lichen and fungi collections.
