Konya Tropical Butterfly Garden

About this place

In a city known for whirling dervishes, the strangest thing you can do is step into a pocket of rainforest sealed inside a glass building shaped like a butterfly, held at 28°C and 80% humidity whatever the Anatolian weather is doing outside. The butterflies arrive as chrysalises in padded boxes from Costa Rica, Malaysia, the Philippines and Kenya, emerge in glass cabinets in front of visitors, and are released into the flight hall; the garden says roughly 20,000 butterflies of some 60 species pass through every month. Nothing is behind a barrier, so the big blue morphos settle on shoulders and heads, which is precisely why children refuse to leave. The building is half the pleasure. Selçuklu municipality designed it with the British engineers Arup, opened it in July 2015 inside the Butterfly Valley park, and clad it in 1,730 glass panes, no two the same size, using a glass that lets ultraviolet through so the butterflies can navigate by the sun as they would at home. It won Turkey's best architectural design award for public buildings in 2018 and earns it from the outside before you even go in. Beyond the flight hall there is an insect museum of dried specimens, giant beetles, stick insects and a small cinema about the insect world, good for another fifteen minutes with small children. Be honest about the sums: the whole visit is an hour to ninety minutes, and foreigners pay 750 lira, more than double the Turkish rate, with children under six free when they come with family. For a family spending two days in Konya with kids this is the best thing to do after the Mevlâna shrine, and in a snowy Konya winter it is a warm refuge worth every lira. A couple passing through for a single dervish evening will lose nothing by skipping it. The floor is flat and pushchair-friendly, but the humidity makes lingering hard work in August, and your camera lens will fog for the first few minutes. It sits in the Selçuklu district about ten kilometres north of the Mevlâna shrine; bus 47 or 57 from Kültürpark stops at the gate, and a taxi from the centre or the airport takes about twenty minutes. Closed Mondays. Early on a sunny morning is the golden hour: the butterflies are at their liveliest and the hall is nearly empty. One unexpected rule: evening gowns and engagement dresses are turned away at the door because the place became a favourite photo-shoot backdrop, and pets are not admitted.