Havana Attractions - Cuba's National Botanical Garden

The National Botanical Garden of Cuba was founded in 1989 in the south part of Havana City with an extension of 600 hectares and which shows today around 4 thousand vegetable species. This Garden is part of the University of Havana, and its main goal is to promote the care of nature and the recognition of the vegetable world, especially, the autochthonous flora.

It has been organized in several restricted areas with certain characteristics: plains of Palm trees, pine forests, Eastern humid forests, wilderness, Mogote vegetation (mogote is a rock formation typical from Pinar del Rio), coastal scrublands; and a sample of the tropical flora from Asia, Africa, The Americas and The Antilles, Australia and Oceania, and other specialized collections (Palmetum, Archaic Forest, the Ekman Collection and the Collection of Economical Plants). Outside those areas, the visitor can enjoy a collection of ornamental aquatic and land plants, including a section dedicated to plants with trunks especially designed by nature to store water.

One of the main attractions of this institution is the Japanese Garden inaugurated in 1989, a work by the Japanese landscape architect Yoshikuni Araki. Located in the phytogeographical area of Southeastern Asia, this garden has an extension of 5 hectares. There, plants belonging to this Asian region are shown, along with others taken from others parts of the world to create the landscape environment "Kaiyu-Shiki-teien" (garden for walking) in which by means of the "mie-gakure" technique, the visitor can see the whole landscape from any point in the garden. It has a cascade, a small lake and a mirador.

The scientific collection of the Botanical Garden of Cuba is stored in greenhouses near the administrative buildings. If a visitor desires to go inside, he/she has to have a previous appointment with the specialists. This collection has specimens of the flora from Cuba and the rest of the world. It also has a herbarium (the second largest in the country) with more that 100 thousand specimens of the Cuban flora and a specialized library with around 4700 titles of books and 1084 titles of periodicals.

The tours around the Garden are always guided by a specialist, who will be able to provide the visitor with all the knowledge of the tropical flora. Being a specialized institution for over 30 years, the technical and professional staff have been in charge of improving the areas on display and plant species, as well as protecting the plants from damage that can be caused by hurricanes.

The collections of live plants being cultivated, especially the native and endangered ones, have a differentiated attention; attention that has increased due to the programs in charge of collecting genetic material in natural areas. The acquisition of seeds and sprouts from other intuitions, national and foreign, has made possible the increase of the collections ex situ. The Garden has also promoted the food culture and the ecologic food in Cuba by means of its gastronomic chain, especially the vegetarian restaurant El Bambu.