At the beginning of February 2024, 90% of the 400 hectares of the national botanical garden of Viña del Mar, located 120 km northeast of Santiago, were destroyed by violent fires. Considered the deadliest in Chile’s recent history, they left 136 dead and destroyed entire neighborhoods of the city.
Faced with the tragedy, the director of the century-old park, Alejandro Peirano, expressed his fears about a possible return of the flames with the start of the summer season and the increase in temperatures.
“It’s certain, we’re going to have a fire,” he predicted to AFP, under one of the rare specimens to have survived the flames, some of which come from the seeds of trees that withstood the atomic bomb of Hiroshima in 1945.
The once lush oasis had already been ravaged by violent fires in 2013, 2018 and 2022, although on a smaller scale than those of last year.
Designed in 1918 by the French architect Georges Dubois, the park had 1,300 species of plants and trees, including mountain cypresses, Chilean palm trees and even Japanese cherry trees. It was also home to a wild fauna of marsupials, gray foxes, Chilean ferrets, as well as numerous birds.
To restore this heritage and strengthen its resilience to fires, dozens of volunteers recently undertook to plant 5,000 native trees, including liters (Lithrea causitca), quillays (Quillaja saponaria) and colliguays (Colliguaja odorifera).
Unlike eucalyptus, an exotic species that burns quickly, these native species are able to cope with flames or contain them for longer, according to research conducted by the Federico Santa Maria Technical University (USM), whose main campus is located in Valparaiso.
“We have demonstrated experimentally that quillay and liter are less flammable than eucalyptus and pine,” Fabian Guerrero, researcher in the USM mechanical engineering department, explains to AFP.
“The idea is to place the species that burn more slowly in front (the others, editor’s note), so that the fires do not advance so quickly,” explains Mr. Peirano. During the 2024 fire, flames consumed almost the entire park in less than an hour.
The planting of these species on eight hectares, carried out thanks to a public-private partnership, precedes a second phase aimed at reforesting the park with specimens capable of adapting “to low rainfall and prolonged drought”, notes Benjamin Veliz , director of the partner NGO Wild Tree.
The project also provides for the construction of firebreaks at the boundaries of the park, where the ravines have already been cleared of any vegetation likely to fuel the flames.
The park also benefited from the abundant rains that fell during 2024 in the center of the country, after more than a decade of repeated episodes of drought.
Young shoots of eucalyptus, mastic trees (Pistacia lentiscus) or peumos (Cryptocarya alba) emerge here and there among the grasses dried out by the sun and the charred remains of trees and shrubs, testifying to the resilience of nature.
“These burning trees come back, because the sclerophyll forest (typical of Mediterranean climates and resistant to summer droughts, editor’s note) reacts well after the fires,” consoles the garden director.
