49
The Botanical Garden of Barcelona might be the most unique botanic garden I’ve ever been to. Among the stadiums from the Summer Olympic Games of 1992 on Montjuïc hill, the botanic garden takes up 14 hectares of hilly terrain. It was established in 1999 and is dedicated to cultivating and displaying plants and ecosystems from the areas around the globe with Mediterranean climate. In the different sections, plants are grown from the western and eastern Mediterranean, Australia, Chile, California, South Africa and the Canary Islands.
This in itself is already impressive, the extent of their plant collection and how they’ve succeeded in making the highly-managed botanic plantations look so self-evolved and untamed. But the physical design of the garden, the structures that create the vegetated terraces, the concrete paths that take the visitors on a world tour of Mediterranean ecosystems, basically, the architecture in itself is also something to behold. The sharp corners and hard surfaces of the concrete and rusted iron takes a little bit getting used to, and might not be for everyone – but I was mesmerized. Here, they had taken the idea of garden architecture and landscaping, and run with it, making something completely their own. But maybe I shouldn’t be surprised, the garden being in Barcelona. After all, that city has plenty of interesting and provoking architecture to boast about.
Photo: Jardí Botànic de Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain, October 2018. Posted on Instagram August 16, 2020.
Katja Malmborg 