Tragedy, resilience and a miracle in Chile's burned botanical garden

On Friday afternoon, several hundred people wandered through the idyllic grounds of Chile's National Botanical Garden, mostly unaware that, just over some hills and a highway, a raging wildfire galloped toward them.

The danger quickly became apparent. Rangers began racing through the park on motorcycles, shouting for visitors to flee for the exits. But by the time many got there, the fire had already arrived.

“There was thick black smoke pouring above us, so we lay down on the grass just inside the gate,” Alejandro Peirano, director of the park, recalled Monday morning. “One of my rangers turned to me and said, 'Director, are we going to die?'”

Elsewhere, three other rangers tried to rescue a colleague, Patricia Araya, 60, a cashier who lived in the park and cared for her two grandsons and 92-year-old mother. They reached the gate of her hut, but the fire came closer. 'I felt the heat burning in my back. I realized they were burning pieces of bark falling on me,” Freddy Sánchez, 50, said Monday as he stood guard at the park's entrance.

“We had to turn around,” he said. “All your body wants is to find a way out of the heat.”

The crowd that had gathered on the front lawn survived – something of a miracle, as 98 percent of the nearly 1,000-acre garden was destroyed.

Ms Araya, her mother and two grandsons were not, becoming four of the 122 confirmed deaths in one of the deadliest wildfire outbreaks in modern history.

On Monday, authorities using cadaver dogs continued the search for bodies in the nearly 40 square kilometers scorched by Friday's fast-moving wildfires in Valparaiso province, a popular resort near Chile's central coast.

They also took stock of the wider destruction, including some 15,000 homes and one of Chile's national gems: the 107-year-old National Botanical Garden of Viña del Mar.

The botanical garden, which extends over 2.5 square kilometers, is one of the largest in the world and is also a crucial conservation and research center for the region. Over decades, staff have created and studied a diverse garden, featuring more than 1,000 tree species, including some of the rarest in the world.

Due to Chile's isolated location, sandwiched between the Andes Mountains and the Pacific Ocean, the country is home to many endemic plant species, meaning they are not found anywhere else in the wild.

The garden played an important role in the conservation of these species, including many rare cacti. It has also had medicinal plants, exotic plants from Europe and Asia, a large collection of species from the remote Juan Fernández Islands in the Pacific Ocean, and some of the world's last known Sophora toromiro trees, which are native to Rapa Nui, or Easter Island. , but are now extinct in the wild.

“It's a terrible loss. Years and years of research that many people have done in that garden, creating special collections,” says Noelia Alvarez de Roman, the Latin American specialist at Botanic Gardens Conservation International, a global network of botanical gardens.

Mr Peirano said the park has been damaged by fires in the past, including in 2013 and 2022, which burned about a quarter of the site. “We are used to it. We patrol the most sensitive areas every day, clean the areas and train people,” he said.

“But this fire was completely unexpected,” he added. “We've never seen anything on this scale.”

Mr Peirano emphasized that the lives lost were far more devastating than the physical damage. Ms. Araya had worked at the park for about 40 years, and this week she planned to do so hold a new wedding ceremony with her longtime partner and then go on vacation together, Mr. Peirano said in a television interview.

She had already taken Friday off from work and her grandsons, ages 1 and 9, came to stay with her earlier that day, he said.

Authorities reiterated Monday that they believed the fires were deliberately set.

Rodrigo Mundaca, the governor of Valparaíso province, told reporters that authorities had determined that at least one major fire had started around 2 p.m. on Friday in four different spots, just a few meters apart.

'Does it seem to me that this could be spontaneous and natural? No,” he said, adding that national forest workers had deliberately extinguished fires a day earlier. “That is why I am saying today that there is clear intent and we hope that the authorities can find those responsible.”

Two people were arrested on Sunday on suspicion of attempting to start a fire near the botanical garden, but were later released after police said they did not have enough evidence. Authorities said they would enforce nighttime curfews as they continue their investigation and recovery from the fires.

High temperatures and dry conditions prior to the fires created dangerous conditions in Chile. The cyclical climate phenomenon known as El Niño has contributed to heat and drought in parts of South Americaand global climate change has also broadly increased temperatures.

Strong winds on Friday caused the fires to spread quickly, catching authorities by surprise and trapping many people as they tried to escape hillside settlements. On Monday, the fire brigade had largely brought the fire under control.

At the botanical garden, smoke from burned eucalyptus forests still hung in the air as workers used chainsaws to cut down fallen trees and helicopters flew overhead with huge buckets of water. Mr. Peirano was clearly saddened, calling the charred gardens behind him “a treasure for the Chileans,” but he was also determined that the forest would grow back.

“The native plants will bloom again, but we will need rain, and we won't get it until May,” he said. He added that some exotic species in the garden also survived the inferno the historic 150 year old banyan tree in Lahaina, Hawaii, which began emerging leaves just weeks after a wildfire destroyed much of the city.

The surviving plants included some of Rapa Nui's nearly extinct Sophora toromiro trees, as well as Ginkgo biloba trees from the park's “Garden of Peace,” which consists of plants that survived the atomic bombing in Hiroshima, Japan.

“They had the power to germinate after Hiroshima,” he said in a television interview on Monday. “Now they will have double the power if they overcome this stage, because the fire passed through them. The trees and what they represent will be twice as strong.”

Daniel Politi And Lisa Moriconi reporting contributed.