A colonial-era manor in the Horto, now the Botanical Garden's graduate school.
The Solar da Imperatriz stands at the top of Rua Pacheco Leão in the Horto, the leafy upper section of the Jardim Botânico neighborhood. It is a white colonial manor house on grounds that trace back to the Engenho Nossa Senhora da Conceição da Lagoa, one of Rio's oldest sugar mills, established in the 16th century.
Today the building is the seat of the Escola Nacional de Botânica Tropical, the research and graduate school of the Botanical Garden Institute, with periodic guided visits open to the public. For buyers looking at the Horto, it anchors the character of the area: federal parkland, low traffic, and streets that end in forest.
Address: Rua Pacheco Leão 2040, Horto, Jardim Botânico, Rio de Janeiro
The manor was built around 1750. In the early 19th century Dom João VI expropriated the estate for the royal gunpowder factory whose grounds gave rise to the Botanical Garden in 1808. The name dates from 1829, from the long-held (and historically confused) belief that Dom Pedro I had given the property to his second wife, Empress Amélia de Leuchtenberg.
Over the following century it served as an agricultural orphanage school (from 1884) and the seat of Brazil's Forest Service (from 1938). IPHAN protected the area in 1973, restoration began in 1998, and the building has housed the Escola Nacional de Botânica Tropical since the early 2000s, with a new round of revitalization works underway in the 2020s.
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