Royal Greenhouses of Laeken

The Royal Greenhouses of Laeken form a small city of glass in the grounds of the Belgian royal palace: domed pavilions, rotundas and long galleries that run between them like covered streets, together enclosing some two and a half hectares. Built almost entirely of iron and glass, they are among the most important 19th-century monuments in Belgium and still house the Royal Botanic Collection, with its camellias, orange trees and plants from Central Africa.

The complex was the project of King Leopold II, who had seen the Crystal Palace in London and wanted something equally modern in his own garden: a place for plants, but also for receptions, performances and dinners. After rejecting a design by the botanist Jean Linden as too modest, he turned to the architect Alphonse Balat, working closely with him over years of sketches and letters. Construction began in 1874 and continued in phases until 1905; after Balat's death in 1895 the work was taken over by Henri Maquet and Charles Girault. The buildings also carried a political message. As Leopold established the Congo Free State, greenhouses such as the Congo Greenhouse and the Embarcadère were filled with Central African plants as a display of his colonial ambitions, a history inseparable from the beauty of the place.

The centrepiece is the Winter Garden of 1874, a rotunda 57 metres across and 25 metres high whose cast-iron trusses rest on a ring of Doric columns, giving the effect of a glass dome braced by flying buttresses. The domed Iron Church of 1893, in neo-Byzantine style and supported by twenty granite columns, was first meant as a royal chapel. The neoclassical Orangery predates Leopold, built in 1817–1819 for King William I of the Netherlands. Balat's plant-like ornament in iron is seen as an early step towards Art Nouveau, which his pupil Victor Horta would carry much further. The camellia collection, with plants dating back to Leopold's time, is considered the oldest and largest of its kind under glass.

Getting there

The greenhouses stand in Laeken, in the north of the City of Brussels, about 2.4 km from the neighbouring municipality of Schaerbeek. Brussels Airport (BRU) is about 9 km away in a straight line. The nearest metro station is Stuyvenbergh on line 6.