Maracaibo Botanical Garden Preservation: An Expanding Landscape

Botanical Garden Preservation as Expansion toward the Urban and Regional Landscape explores how the legacy of Roberto Burle Marx’s Botanical Garden of Maracaibo can guide contemporary strategies of ecological repair, education, and territorial resilience. Conceived in 1983 as a garden school for the preservation of the tropical dry forest, the garden’s most enduring value lies not only in its physical form, but in its immaterial pedagogical mission—designed to build itself over time through learning, care, and collective stewardship.
Following the successful reopening of the Botanical Garden of Maracaibo after three decades of abandonment, the project frames preservation as a dynamic and expansive process. At the garden scale, restoration focuses on reviving life zones of the tropical dry forest, rediscovering hydrological systems that ensure biological continuity, and reactivating moments of centrality and visibility. These interventions position the garden as a living microcosm of the region.
Beyond its boundaries, the project translates botanical and hydrological principles into the urban fabric. A landscape framework along the 5 de Julio commercial corridor transforms the city into a learning landscape, where native vegetation, water systems, and a network of botanical “oases” reconnect arid zones, urban centers, and the lake.
At the regional scale, degraded territories are reimagined through botanical armatures that restore hydrological structures and give rise to new lake-based academies—lacustrine campuses fostering mutual transformation among human and non-human species.
This project is both a biographical journey and a public call to action, affirming that care, knowledge, and persistence can transform abandonment into collective ecological futures.