The Dr. Rafael María Moscoso National Botanical Garden, also known as the Santo Domingo National Botanical Garden, is a unique arboretum garden with an area of preserved wild natural vegetation, located in Santo Domingo, capital of the Dominican Republic.
This natural space in the 60’s and early 70’s was a military regiment. The Botánico is renewed on a daily basis, showing, in its approximately two million square meters, a great diversity of plants and spaces with various buildings, which house the departments of Botany and Horticulture, Environmental Education, among others.
This important green area of Greater Santo Domingo is considered one of the ten best botanical gardens in the world and is visited by millions of people a year for its beauty that envelops the senses and its fascinating appeal.
It contains a very interesting nature reserve, with this area the Garden complies with the international agreement of the botanical gardens to have at least 10% of its area for a nature reserve. This occupies 40% of the total area of the garden. Numerous representative species of the flora of the Española Island grow in this reserve and, in recent years, it has also become a refuge for the area’s wildlife.
In this area a permanent stream of water flows that forms a special environment within the Garden. It runs 1.6 km long through the entire length of the Nature Reserve and flows into the Isabela River, in the surroundings of the National Zoological Park of Santo Domingo.
The place exhibits around 40 species of aquatic and marshy plants, with 48 ponds and 61 fish tanks. Among those they show are the Lotus, aeneas, papyrus, water lilacs, potato chips, sagittarius, echinodorus and pontederias. It also has an area of approximately 8,000 meters, where native, foreign and hybrid species are exhibited. In the Dominican Republic, the Bromeliaceae family has 57 species.
Los Helechos occupies about 150 square meters, with three planters in its central part where there are aquatic and marshy ferns such as: Salvinia, Azolla and Acrostichum or mangrove fern. Española Island has some 600 species of ferns, many of which grow naturally in the different environments of the Botanical Garden.
Apart from all the things I have mentioned, it has Exotic Plants and Baskets, in this pavilion various species of Caladium, Dracaenas, Philodendron, Spatephillum and Aracea are grown in baskets and planters.
There are so many attractions that surround this place with beauty that if you frequent it, it can become your fixed center of healthy fun and the ideal place to come as a family breathing fresh air through all the bushes that surround this beautiful park.
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How to get to the National Botanical Garden: