Estufa Fria

Garden · Avenidas NovasLisbon,Portugal

A Lisbon greenhouse with no glass, roofed in wooden laths that let the rain through, sunk inside a flooded basalt quarry.

The Estufa Fria is a greenhouse with no glass in it. The roof is a lattice of wooden laths that breaks the sun into stripes and lets the rain fall straight through, so the weather comes inside. In a colder country the plants would die; Lisbon's winters are mild enough for them to thrive. Inside there are streams, ponds, stone bridges and tree ferns, all sunk below ground level, because the whole thing sits in a worked-out basalt quarry. The quarry was abandoned because springs kept flooding the workings, and what happened next was an accident: the garden established itself first and the building was drawn around it afterwards, opening in 1930. Two later additions of 1975 are conventionally glazed and keep warmer collections. Its camellias and azaleas flower through the Lisbon winter, so the coldest months are not the empty ones here. More than three hundred species are spread across the three houses.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Sun and rain show two different things — high sun cuts the laths into stripes across the paths, rain runs through onto the ferns, and flat cloud gives you neither.
It has closed for repairs before — the cold house was shut two years for structural work and reopened in 2011, so check before you make the walk up through the park.
The paths are uneven and wet — this is a quarry floor with streams running through it, and the stone underfoot stays damp in every season.
Three houses, one visit — the lath-roofed cold house is the reason to come; the two glazed houses next door hold a different collection behind glass.

Things to do

1
Go in the rain
Wait for a wet afternoon and walk the cold house then. Water falls through the laths onto the ferns, the streams run harder and the stone darkens. The roof was built to let the weather in, so rain is the condition the whole interior was made for.
2
Look up at the stripes
Stand on one of the bridges and look at the roof. The laths cut the sun into bands that fall across the paths and the leaves and move as the day goes on. That pattern is the whole point of the roof: there is no glass above you at any point, only wood and sky.
3
Walk from the cold house into the hot one
Go straight from the lath house into the glazed house next door. The air changes in a single step, from open and moving to humid, still and warm. Feeling that difference is the quickest way to understand what the lath roof next door is doing.