The Historical Botanical Garden, La Concepción is an English landscape garden with more than 150 years of history. It is one of the few gardens with subtropical climate plants in Europe. It has more than fifty thousand plants, of two thousand tropical, subtropical and autochthonous species, highlighting the collection with more than one hundred different species of palms, bamboos, aquatic plants and its historical garden.
It was originally the recreational estate of a family of the city's upper middle class from the middle of the 19th century, until 1990, when it passed into public ownership, with Malaga City Council founding the Municipal Botanical Board 'City of Malaga' to manage it.
La Concepción was built around 1855 thanks to the work of the married couple formed by Jorge Loring y Oyarzábal and Amalia Heredia Livermore, Marquises of the Casa Loring. Jorge Loring, one of the most influential figures in 19th century Malaga and a personal friend of Cánovas del Castillo and Francisco Silvela, was a successful businessman, as well as a member of the Spanish Parliament. His wife Amalia Heredia, daughter of the industrialist Manuel Agustín Heredia, was a cultured woman, interested in plants, books and archaeology. Thus, in La Concepción they treasured a substantial archaeological heritage, of which there are still some remains in the form of Roman sculptures and mosaics; and a rich botanical heritage, thanks, among other things, to the skill of a French gardener called Chamoussant.
After the economic bankruptcy of the Loring-Heredia family, the estate was bought in 1911 by the Echevarría Azcárate family (from the marriage of Rafael Echevarría Azcárate and Amalia Echevarrieta Maruri), who made important improvements and expanded the collection of trees and palms. In 1943 the garden was declared a historic-artistic garden, today an Asset of Cultural Interest. After the couple's death, the estate was managed by Amalia's brother, Horacio Echevarrieta Maruri, who kept it until his death in 1963. From that moment on, the space fell into decadence and progressive abandonment.
In 1990 the garden was acquired by Malaga City Council, which, after four years of renovation and adaptation, opened it to the public. Since then, new spaces and gardens have been added around the Historical Garden, in the form of themed gardens, including those dedicated to palm trees, carnivorous plants and orchids, others to cacti and succulents, and the Around the World in Eighty Trees.
La Concepción occupies an area of fifty-five hectares, of which twenty-five belong to the historical garden. Next to this, there are the theme gardens and a large area of untransformed native Mediterranean woodland which can be visited; these are the so-called "forest route" and the "route of the viewpoints" in the upper part of the garden.