You don’t have to go to Berlin to visit abandoned places! Abandoned and overgrown, the Jardin d’Agronomie Tropicale de Paris is both exotic and timeless. The Jardin d’agronomie tropicale is located at the very end of the Bois de Vincennes, in the easternmost tip of Paris. While most of the exotic plants, apart from a few bamboos and persimmons, have disappeared, a few abandoned buildings dating back to the 1907 Colonial Exhibition remain.
A little history
The garden was created in 1899 to test plantations from the colonies and improve supplies to mainland France. At the time, this test garden had a multitude of exotic plants, such as coffee trees, banana trees, rubber trees, cocoa trees, vanilla trees and, the only survivors over the years, bamboo and persimmons.
In 1907, a “colonial exhibition” was held here, bringing together the Asian and African “conquests” (which is why there are Cambodian and Congolese pavilions here today). For the exhibition, Paris built genuine reproductions of Congolese, Indochinese, Kanak and Madagascan villages, and brought in inhabitants of each country, dressed in their traditional costumes, to live in their assigned village and put on a kind of show for the French… a show later dubbed the “human zoo“.
After several uses during the war, including space for the École d’agronomie tropicale, the garden was completely abandoned…
Today, it’s a romantic little country trip (well, that’s if you want it to be) without even leaving Paris!
Although the original Congo pavilion burned down and the others were looted, some of the original buildings are still more or less well preserved, planted throughout the garden. Here you can see: the Congo pavilion (now completely ruined), the Guiana pavilion, the Indochina pavilion, the Morocco pavilion, the Reunion pavilion and the Tunisia pavilion.
Stroll around and you’ll find Indochinese relics: the Dinh esplanade, a rectangular space featuring a Vietnamese-inspired stone portico, a bronze funeral urn with imperial motifs from the palace at Hué (an absolutely sublime imperial city in central Vietnam) and the Temple of Indochinese Remembrance, as well as other South Asian elements, such as a Khmer bridge, a Tonkinese bridge, a Chinese gate, etc.
Jardin d’Agronomie Tropicale – access via avenue de la Belle-Gabrielle. RER station: Nogent-sur-Seine, line A
See also: Ichikawa, an idyllic Japanese garden just a stone’s throw from Paris