Jardin Botánico Carlos Thays

This post on the Jardin Botánico Carlos Thays may break a record for the shortest entry in this journal. After the long flight that landed me in Buenos Aires yesterday afternoon, I slept in this morning. At least, that is to say, it counted as sleeping in for me. Those of you who often sleep until 11:00 or noon might disagree.

The point is, by the time I got up, showered, dressed, and went to a nearby café for an espresso and croissant, I wasn’t ready to head out until a few minutes after 10:00. Yesterday, I booked a three-hour tour starting at noon today. You can probably guess from the fact that it starts at noon and is scheduled for three hours what type of tour it is. For those who can’t, I’ll leave you in suspense. I’ll write a separate post for that tour.

Once I got going, I took an Uber to the starting point of that tour, which is in the Palermo district of Buenos Aires. I then walked around the Palermo district, including over to the Jardin Botánico Carlos Thays. I won’t talk much about the Palermo neighbourhood here because that tour, and what I will be doing after it, is in the Palermo district. I’ll talk about it then. (I’ll publish a separate entry for my post-tour activities. So, there’ll be three posts today.) Suffice it to say that Palermo is a lovely, leafy, residential district with some parks, restaurants, and stores.

Jardin Botánico Carlos Thays

The Jardin Botánico Carlos Thays* is, as the Spanish name suggests, a botanical garden. It’s not terribly large, but large enough to be quite enjoyable. It doesn’t have any flowers, per se, that I saw, but there are a few flowering trees and shrubs. However, I recognize that there might be more flowers at other times of the year. I don’t know. It’s the tail end of summer here now, so I would have thought flowers should be in bloom now.

(*The linked website above is in Spanish. If you want to look at it and don’t speak Spanish, you can use the translate function of your browser to read it.)

The garden is full of a variety of trees, bushes, and shrubs, along with considerable groundcover of both grass and broadleaf varieties and several statues. There were very few signs naming the species in the park, and I’m a botany ignoramus. So, let’s just refer to it all as “vegetation,” shall we?

The scant signage in the Jardin Botánico is mostly in Spanish, but some instructional signs had a little English saying things like “stay on the paths.” Fortunately, before coming on this trip, I learned the most important word in the Spanish language: “banos“. It means bathrooms. I was very relieved to see a “banos” sign in the garden. I was even more relieved after using the referenced banos.

Jardin Botánico Carlos Thays also has an interpretive centre in a small building and a small greenhouse with tropical plants. The interpretive centre had a sign outside with “entrance” written in both English and Spanish, but all of the text inside that I glanced at was solely in Spanish. Maybe I would have spotted some English if I had done more glancing, but I didn’t. There wasn’t much time left before I had to leave for the noon tour and, even if there was, trying to read the text with Google Translate probably would have been more of a burden than it would have been worth. So I quickly left the interpretive centre.

The greenhouse was closed. Or, at least, it certainly looked it. I saw some information signage through the glass walls, so I didn’t think it was a non-public nursery. I decided to check with the attendant standing in front of the interpretive centre about the status of the greenhouse.

Before I approached her, I pulled out my phone, opened up the Google Translate app, typed in, “Is the greenhouse open?” and got a Spanish translation. I then approached her and asked if she spoke English.

Before she responded, she pulled out her phone. I could see she was about to open Google Translate. Before she did, I stopped her and showed her my phone. She responded, “no” and said something in Spanish that I didn’t understand, but it included the word “Sabato.” That sounded to me like the word for one of the weekend days. I checked with Google Translate and found that it does indeed mean Saturday.

I still don’t know how Saturday figured into it. Had the greenhouse been closed for a while for some reason, but it is reopening this Saturday? Is it open only on Saturdays? But the relevant point was that the greenhouse was closed today.

By then, it was time to head over to the tour, so I left Jardin Botánico Carlos Thays and walked to the tour starting point. And that’s where I’ll leave off for now.