(El Salto) A lush oasis teeming with native and exotic plants, Chile’s largest botanical garden is reduced to ashes and despair, charred over most of its 400 hectares by one of the forest fires that ravaged the region.
The Vina Del Mar National Botanical Garden was caught in the blaze that killed 131 people and destroyed entire neighborhoods near Valparaiso, 120 kilometers from Santiago. The nursery manager and members of her family are among the victims.
Thousands of trees blackened, some lying on the ground, the hills surrounding the gardens covered in ash. Formerly considered “a green lung”, the botanical garden of the seaside town today resembles “a smoker’s lung”, laments the park director, Alejandro Peirano.
Designed by French architect Georges Dubois in 1918, the park was home to 1,300 species of plants and trees, including native and exotic ferns, mountain cypresses, Chilean palm trees and Japanese cherry trees.
Mr. Peirano recounts the vigor with which the fire, jumping from one tree to another, consumed the park in barely an hour. “Being optimistic, I would say that five hectares were saved, the rest burned.”
The park was also home to wildlife including marsupials, gray foxes, Chilean ferrets and many birds.
Hiroshima’s trees survived
Among the miraculous survivors of this deluge of fire, the toromiro, a tree with yellow flowers native to distant Easter Island, extinct in the wild, but planted in certain botanical gardens and private collections thanks to seeds preserved ago several decades.
“We avoided what could have been the most painful loss,” consoles Mr. Peirano.
The trees of the Peace Garden, grown from the seeds of trees that survived the atomic bomb of Hiroshima in 1945 and shared by Japan throughout the world, were also spared: although “tanned by the heat, they will remain standing,” says the director of the park of 60 employees.
Most of them, who lived on the site, were able to flee as the flames approached. But Patricia Araya, manager of the nursery, died alongside her mother and two granddaughters.
Daniela Gutierrez, 32, who supervises the cactus collection, remembers “her green thumb, because everything she planted sprouted.”
The Vina Del Mar National Botanical Garden had already been attacked by major fires in 2013, 2018 and 2022, but not as devastating, according to Mr. Peirano, who has run the park for 10 years.
He says he suspects foul play. An investigation is underway.
After cleaning up the dead trees, the garden hopes to reopen its doors to the public in a few weeks. But if another fire of this magnitude occurs, “we will disappear,” fears Mr. Peirano.