The canopy walk
Five and a half metres up among the treetops.
The Flora opened in eighteen sixty-four as a private pleasure garden laid out by Peter Joseph Lenne, with a hall of glass and iron at its centre modelled on London's Crystal Palace. Next door lay the municipal botanical garden, and in nineteen twenty the two were merged into the single site of about eleven hectares that now sits north of the centre beside the zoo. The big new thing here opened on the twelfth of June, twenty twenty-six: a three-winged glasshouse complex covering three thousand square metres and holding more than six thousand plant species from the tropics and from the deserts of the Old and New Worlds. In the tropical wing a walkway five and a half metres up lets you move through the canopy rather than look at it from below. Admission is entirely free, which is unusual for a site on this scale. The outdoor garden opens from eight in the morning until dusk; the glasshouses run from ten to six, and ten to four in winter. The cable car station and the zoo are a few minutes away on foot, and the three combine easily into a single half-day.
Five and a half metres up among the treetops.
A glass and iron hall from 1864.
Amsterdamer Strasse 34, 50735 Cologne
Yes, if you combine it with what surrounds it. The Flora, the zoo and the left-bank cable car station all sit in one block north of the centre, about ten minutes by underground from the main station. For the garden alone an hour is enough, but the trip earns its keep when you follow it with the cable car across the river.
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