Botanic Gardens
The only tropical garden on the World Heritage list, eighty hectares in the middle of the city.
Duration
1 hr 30 min – 3 hrs
Best time
Before 9am
Open
Every day
Entry price
Free
The gardens were laid out in 1859 and are the only tropical garden on the World Heritage list. They played a real economic role: the rubber-tapping technique that founded South-East Asia's rubber industry was developed here.
Eighty hectares, open from five in the morning to midnight, and free — except the National Orchid Garden, which is ticketed and holds a thousand species and two thousand hybrids. The rest is open: a remnant of primary rainforest, lakes, a bandstand.
Getting there
MRT Circle or Downtown line, Botanic Gardens station: the exit opens onto the Bukit Timah gate.
Rules on site
The park runs several kilometres with four gates: work out which one leaves you near your next stop. The afternoon downpour falls almost daily from November to January.
Other places in Singapore
- Gardens by the BayFifty-metre steel trees that light up after dark.
- Marina Bay promenadeThe bay, the three towers and the boat laid across them, seen from the water.
- Chinatown and the Buddha Tooth Relic TempleHerbalists, hawker centres and a five-storey Buddhist temple in the middle of it.
- Sultan Mosque and Kampong GlamThe golden dome of the Malay quarter, and the mural alleys of Haji Lane right behind it.