Barcelona

The garden was designed in the 1960s by Mrs Van der Harst, a landscape artist and the wife of the then manager of the Philips factory, to provide the workers there with a space for relaxing in during their working-day rest periods.
Regarding the name “Human Rights Garden”, there are 30 lighting points placed at random on the route round with the 30 Articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (United Nations, 1948) and another point with a poem by the Argentinian poet, Maria Elena Walsh, Como la cigarra, that pays homage to the people who went missing during the military dictatorships in Chile and Argentina.

The garden preserves most of the trees and shrubs from the original arrangement. Many of the trees were acquired during Ms Van der Harst’s journeys around the world and gradually incorporated into the garden over the years.
A major restoration project began in 2007 which allowed new plantings to make it feel even more like a leafy forest, which is the state the vegetation had reached with the passage of time.
With the restoration finished, 70 new specimens of trees were added to the garden, as well as perennials and climbing plants to enhance the understorey feel and a greater proportion of grass included. This favoured the presence of some specimens of Canna spp near the pond.
The garden has areas of grass and common ivy, which blend and mix in with the current vegetation, groups herbaceous and aromatic plants with a stark contrast in colour, organised in a strong linear structure in the groups of newly created parterres.