Jardín Botánico

Why it exists

The idea was simple on paper. Spain was bringing plants back from the Americas and Asia, and they died on reaching the central plateau. The Canaries, halfway there and with an intermediate climate, looked like the place where they could adapt gradually before moving on to the royal gardens of Aranjuez and Madrid.

It never worked as intended: plants acclimatised here and still died there, because rather more than a stopover separates Puerto de la Cruz from the Castilian plateau. But the garden stayed, and what began as a staging post became a living collection of tropical and subtropical species with more than two centuries behind it.

The project was entrusted to Alonso de Nava y Grimón, Marquis of Villanueva del Prado, and work began in 1790. The La Orotava name stuck because Puerto de la Cruz was then that municipality’s port. It has been listed as a cultural asset in the historic garden category since 1994.

What to see

The most striking thing is not a flower but a tree: an enormous South American fig whose aerial roots have come down from the branches and knotted into something that looks like a single organism and takes up a whole corner of the garden on its own.

Around it, two centuries of collecting: palms, orchids, bromeliads, breadfruit, cinnamon, coffee, a pond of aquatic plants and much of the tropical flora that entered Spain through this very place. It is a small, flat site, walkable in a little over an hour, and it sits in Puerto de la Cruz itself, minutes on foot from the centre.