Bogotá Botanical Garden Historical Timeline

A collection three centuries in the making

Mutis arrived in New Granada in 1761 and eventually led the Royal Botanical Expedition, a project that ran from 1783 until 1816 and, at its peak, had some twenty illustrators working at once. Between them they produced more than 6,000 botanical illustrations and 24,000 herbarium specimens — an almost absurd volume of work for the era. Mutis died in 1808 with most of it still unpublished; the drawings and specimens eventually made their way to the Royal Botanical Garden in Madrid, where they remain one of the most complete visual records of South American flora ever assembled.

A living namesake

The garden itself didn't exist until nearly 150 years later. In 1955, botanist Enrique Pérez Arbeláez secured just over 43 acres from Bogotá's city council to found it, naming it for Mutis as a deliberate continuation of his work — cataloguing Colombia's plant life, this time as a living collection rather than a folio of drawings.