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| Jardin Botanico |
I had not intended to visit the gardens. I was in Ciudad
Bolivar for its historical connections, before spending some time at a jungle
camp on the Orinoco delta. It was purely by accident that I had seen a sign as
we had driven in from the airport the previous day. I always make a point of visiting parks and gardens in any city I visit, so I
checked my guidebook for information.
There wasn’t any. The Jardin
Botánico was marked on the city map, but the only mention of it in the text was
in the directions to a restaurant. This piqued my interest. I obviously needed
to find out whether the garden actually existed. At least if it was no longer
open, I would have somewhere to eat.
More urgently than that, I needed to find my hotel. The taxi driver first stopped outside a
building that looked very closed, and crucially, was not at the address on my
booking confirmation. I remonstrated, but he continued banging on the
door. Eventually, a man in a grubby
t-shirt who had clearly been roused from his siesta emerged. It transpired that
the closed-looking building was the sister hotel of the posada where I was
staying. As it was low season they didn’t bother to staff both hotels.
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| Casa Piar |
The historic quarter was colourful, to say the least. In Plaza Bolívar the bright pink Casa del
Congreso de Angostura where the Angostura Congress was held in 1819, jostled
for attention with the vivid blue Casa Piar where General Manuel Piar was
imprisoned in October 1817 and the ochre yellow cathedral.
Music from a service in the cathedral could clearly be heard
as cleaners swept the plaza. In one corner an incongruous note was struck by a
group of youths putting on stilts. The service ended and the worshippers,
dressed in business clothes complete with name badges, filed out of the cathedral,
laid a floral tribute in front of the Bolívar statue in the centre of the plaza
and posed for a group photo. They then
left, led by the boys on stilts.
I set off in a different direction, in search of the
mysterious botanical garden. Following the map in my guidebook I came to a
park. Perhaps this was it? But then I noticed a group of buildings in the
distance that looked like the entrance to a something. On closer inspection it
was definitely the entrance to a garden. I couldn’t see a ticket office
anywhere but a party of schoolchildren were going in, so it must be open. I wandered in. Someone waved and shouted at me so I wandered
out again.
Through a mix of Spanish and sign language I inferred that I
should wait. Eventually, Felix arrived
and explained, in excellent English, that visitors had to be accompanied by a
member of staff. He offered to show me round. Among the plants he pointed out
were a baobab tree and a purple-leaved plant which he told me was known as the
cockroach plant, but the dominating
feature was bromeliads, both in pots and living on trees. These are very
expensive in Venezuela and are therefore regarded as a status symbol. Security
at the gardens is tight.
The garden has two main functions: conservation (of plants, snakes not so much!) and education. Hosting school visits is the education side of
their work, but preserving rare species is just as important. Felix led me to a
greenhouse in which cuttings and seedlings were being propagated in old plastic
drinks cups filled with river sand. Can you get more eco-friendly than that?
I insisted on making a donation towards expenses and set off in search of that restaurant.
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