The oldest botanical gardens in Southeast Asia, the Bogor Botanical Gardens were founded in 1817 under the Dutch East Indies government. Helmed by famous Dutch botanists over the colonial years, the Gardens has been a centre for botanical and agricultural research up till today. Sitting in the city centre next to the Istana Bogor presidential palace compound, it is currently managed by the Indonesian Institute of Sciences.

The Istana Bogor has a series of beautiful sculptures, including the Little Mermaid created by the renowned Hans Christian Andersen, and a beautiful lotus pound. Within the gardens itself, there are over 16,000 species of plants and trees and they have many collections of local plants and international plants. The local plants include their Pandan tree collection, fern collection and orchid gardens, all of which are famous throughout Southeast Asia.

They even have a monument to the palm oil plant, a tribute to the nation holding the title as the largest exporter of palm oil in the word. It also has a monuent dedicated to Johannes Elias Teijsmann, the botanist who was in service to the Gardens for fifty years and introduced palm oil (and the cassava plant!) to Indonesia. He even has a field and monument in his honour in the Gardens, called the Medan Teijsmann. They even have a laboratory named after Melchior Treub, another director of the Gardens, housed in the mansion he lived in. It is now a famous place in Indonesia to take photos and shoot films.

Other monuments include the Lady Raffles Memorial Monument, a colonial artifact dedicated to the first wife of Thomas Stamford Raffles, governor-general of Bencoolen, Indonesia. In line with remembrance, there is an old Dutch cemetery in the grounds of Botanical Gardens, with some tombs stretching back to beyond the establishment of the Gardens. If you’re tired of the outdoors, they even have a Zoological Museum in the park grounds. A place with a long history of science and memories, the Bogor Botanical Gardens is a beautiful and whimsical place to get lost in.