Toledo brings its Andalusian past to life through flora and plants

This week this cultural and artistic heritage, left in Toledo, was increased with the opening of the exhibition “Itinerary: Andalusian Botany” which You can visit the gardens of the Santa Cruz Museum and by the Sephardim and which began to be programmed so that the public could visit and enjoy it in the courtyards of these museums.

From this Thursday, the Santa Cruz Museum offers an Andalusian botany itinerary, through 14 stops where we want to give visibility to the species and agronomic knowledge from the era of Islamic domination of the Iberian Peninsula.

In the interior and exterior patio of the building you can see bitter orange, yew, olive, rose, myrtle, Moorish myrtleviolet, cypress, rosemary, alhucema, cantueso, lavender, lavender, oleander, the stroll, the lily, the boxwood, the sumac and the peach treeplants which are part of the first stage of this project, which will be completed by another itinerary in the spring at the Sephardic Museum.

A project in which, in addition to these two museums, institutions like the FFoundation of Islamic Culture (Funci), the Moroccan Embassy in Spain, the Botanical Garden of Castile-La Mancha, the Botanical Garden of the University of Alicante or the Association of Friends of Santa Cruz Vivo.

“Choral project”

During the presentation of the exhibition, the director of the Santa Cruz Museum, Antonio Dávila, explained that he wanted to integrate into this “very pleasant walk” through the cloisters of Santa Cruz the possibility of knowing “the past and the Andalusian tradition. thanks to the plants and vegetation, many of which were already in this space.

This is an “essentially choral” project.said the director of Santa Cruz, thanking all the organizations that collaborated in the botanical project that It is complemented by pieces that maintain the center.

Treatises of the 11th century

For her part, the Deputy Minister of Culture, Carmen Teresa Olmedoexplained that it was in it was in the 11th century that they appeared in Toledo the first treatises of great Andalusian agronomists which now served as an instrument to see what would be the definition of the gardens of that time, “when Toledo became the capital of a kingdom of taifas”.

Thanks to the treaties that made Toledo the center of agricultural knowledge, it was possible, both at the Sephardic Museum and in Santa Cruz, to define the varieties that we planted, he told the vice-counsellor, to indicate that some of these species were already present such as the olive tree, the yew or the boxwood.

Olmedo mentioned that the itinerary included the Moorish myrtle, “practically disappeared” and from which certain plants emerged “in a curious way” in the Generalife of Granada, which endeavored to continue planting them, as well as a rose bush “of a specific species”. He took the opportunity to thank the collaboration of all the entities that collaborated in this initiative.

“Miscellaneous plants”

Finally, the director of the Sephardic Museum, Carmen Álvarez, spoke about the one that can be visited since spring in this art gallery and which is currently in progress. He said it would be a tour “fully integrated with the content of the museum exhibition” and that, so far, a dozen “particularly diverse” floors have been selected, although many others could still be incorporated.

The director of the Sephardic Museum stressed that it is a project that required “hard research work” between museums, scientific institutions, multidisciplinary specialists and the Islamic, Sephardic and Spanish Jewish worlds.