Brazil’s cradle of the modern tropical garden ready to open as a World Heritage Site

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The Burle Marx Site, the Brazilian botanical garden that has one of the largest collections of tropical and subtropical plants in the world, is said to be ready to meet the curiosity it will generate globally after being recognized this Tuesday (27) as a new Unesco World Heritage Site.

Brazil’s 23rd World Heritage Site is a country house on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, with an area of 405,325 square meters, which the renowned Brazilian landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx (1909-1994) bought in 1949 and turned into his private botanical garden and a “laboratory” of experiences in landscaping that served as the cradle of the modern tropical garden.

The estate has 3,500 species of plants, some threatened with extinction or that have already disappeared in their countries of origin, and many rare or exotic, but its greatest wealth are the gardens created by the landscaper and in which he experimented with variations of colors, confections, and textures with the different plants that he collected during his travels to Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

The Site was declared today (July 27) as a new World Heritage property, in the Cultural Landscape category, by the Unesco World Heritage Committee, which met last week in the Chinese city of Fuzhou.

Because it is little known in Brazil and because of the restrictions involved in opening the gates of a garden that is a guardian of the preservation of living species, the new World Heritage site only receives about 140 visitors per day, but, given its new status, it says it is ready for many more people to get to know it.

“What we anticipate with Unesco’s recognition is that there will be an increase in the public, an increase in demand, and we are already working with that. Some time ago, we made an effort to allow an increase in visits and receive more visitors,” said the director of the Burle Marx Site, Claudia Storino.

“Our normal attention, without pandemic times, is a maximum of 140 people per day. We are studying the Site’s carrying capacity, and we believe that can be expanded, but not much. We believe that about 200 people per day would be the maximum,” she added.

According to the director, the big problem is that the Site’s heritage is its living collection (the botanical collection), which has to be kept in good conditions and without risks.

The architect, designer, and preservation specialist who has directed the Site since 2012 explained that demand had already been increasing since, in 2018, its candidacy for World Heritage was postulated. Since then, the institution went through a deep process of requalification and several works.

“We had to expand the care and the quality of care, already also thinking about the World Heritage candidacy. And we expect that the public will increase, and we will have a lot of work to serve this public better,” she said.

“But we are working to offer virtual access. We are working on building a good quality virtual tour and resources like audio guides and other resources that will help the visitor, enhance the experience of the visit and allow us to increase the number of people,” she added.

Burle Marx lived at the site between 1973 and 1994, and for 45 years, collected plants from all over the world, some at risk of extinction. In 1985 he donated it to the Brazilian government to preserve this wealth and create a center for disseminating knowledge about landscaping.

The garden features plants with landscape potential, especially bromeliads, heliconias, arecaceae, orchids, palms, cycads, velloziaceae, and 34 species linked to Burle Marx, two that he discovered and 16 named in his honor.

The Site also has five water mirrors and seven shaded greenhouses. Burle Marx’s original house houses 3,000 museum pieces, including works of art, sculptures, books, architectural plans, and antiques.

Despite its natural wealth and the fact that it contains unique and endangered species, Brazil’s National Historical and Artistic Heritage Institute (Ipham) preferred to nominate it as a candidate for cultural and not natural or mixed property because of its importance for world landscaping, since the movement born in this house put an end to centuries of European hegemony.

The house, declared Brazilian Cultural Heritage in 1985, preserves the experiments that Burle Marx made before designing the nearly 3,000 public and private gardens that he left as a legacy all over the world, in addition to his rich artistic production, which includes engravings, silkscreen prints, drawings, sculptures, tapestries, ceramic panels, jewelry and even stages for theater plays.