With the summer days finally here in the Netherlands, what better way to spend the day than being surrounded by beautiful butterflies! But where can you find these butterflies? At a Dutch butterfly park of course! Let’s venture to three of these exotic locations…
Vlindertuin Vlindorado is one of the biggest butterfly gardens in Europe (not the biggest, we’ll come back to this later). Due to the tropical temperatures and exotic flora and fauna surrounding you on your visit, it’ll feel like you escaped to the tropics. Each week, hundreds of butterfly pupae arrive at Vlindorado - around 500 to 800 in fact! These come from Costa Rica, The Philippines and Malaysia. Vlindorado also cultivates some tropical butterflies itself.
The Vlinderica at Pantropica, formerly known as Orchideeën Hoeve, is the biggest butterfly garden in the whole of Europe! That’s right, here in the little country that is the Netherlands. In this garden, you’ll be able to see more than 2.000 butterflies flapping their wings.
The butterfly park has its own nursery where it cultivates a few tropical butterflies; however, it also imports more than 55 kinds of tropical butterflies from Costa Rica and the Philippines weekly. These are sent to Pantropica by post in their pupae form. It only takes a couple of days (up to 10) in the hatchery before the cocoons burst open and the butterflies take their first flight.
Here, the butterfly garden is not only home to butterflies, but you’ll also be able to see turtles, an iguana, parakeets and other tropical birds and animals during your visit.
There are hundreds of beautiful butterflies to admire at Vlinders aan de Vliet in Leidschendam. They cultivate 15 percent themselves and 85 percent is purchased in pupae form from nurseries in tropical countries. The garden is open from the middle of February until the beginning of November. After this, the weather becomes too dark and cold in the greenhouse for the butterflies.
The park is actually a hobby that just got out of hand and transformed into a jungle / butterfly garden, with hundreds of butterflies, birds, water animals - like turtles and fish, and unusual plants and flowers.
We could go on and on about the beautiful butterfly parks in the Netherlands, but then we’d be here all day! In any case, we have only mentioned three, but there are a few more in the country. Don’t fancy visiting a park full of these mesmerising flying insects? You could take a trip to a botanical garden instead and admire the plants…
So, which butterfly park will you be visiting? Let us know in the comments below!