Jardín Botánico

This guide to the Jardin Botanico in Valencia starts under an iron-and-glass roof that only exists because an earlier timber hothouse, built in the 1840s by architect Timoteo Calvo, rotted apart in the Mediterranean damp within a few years. You'll hear how the university turned to a new architect, Sebastian Monleon, in 1859, drawing up a quarter-circle greenhouse of iron and thousands of individual glass panes, at a time when Spain had barely any tradition of building in the material. It follows the workers teaching themselves the craft as they went, borrowing tricks from greenhouses and train sheds rising elsewhere in Europe.