Botanical Garden

With more than 4 hectares, the Botanical Garden is currently owned by the University of Porto. It was set up in 1951 in part of the Quinta do Campo Alegre as it was then called. It is dominated by the elegant Casa Andresen, which belonged to the Andresens until 1949 and whose name evokes important figures of twentieth-century Portuguese literature. The Portuguese writers Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen and Ruben A. lived and worked here. This romantic garden has a unique beauty to which nobody is indifferent. Its outlines are the same as in the late nineteenth century and it still features the “J” Garden after the initials of its former owners, Joana and João Andresen. Other garden spaces were created in the 1950s and 1960s after the transformation of the Quinta do Campo Alegre into an institute of botany, with groves, greenhouses, a nursery, a big lake and the "Xisto Garden" featuring aquatic plants and designed by Franz Koepp. The garden has a significant number of rare and exotic species, and plants typically found in summer residences in nineteenth-century Porto.