Puy du Fou Spain and the Royal Foundation of Toledo have formalized this Tuesday morning a collaboration agreement to support the “Historic Nursery”, a pioneering project whose objective is to promote among citizens the knowledge and preservation of the historical botanical wealth of the city of imperial, especially of autochthonous species with high environmental value due to their historical significance, age, rarity or size.
Present at this presentation ceremony were Fernando Marchán, Deputy Minister for the Environment of Castilla-La Mancha; Eduardo Sanchez Butragueño, General Director of the Royal Foundation of Toledo; Jesús Carrobles, president of the Board of Protectors of the Royal Foundation of Toledo; and Erwan de la Villéon, CEO of Puy du Fou Spain.
As a symbol of the beginning of this agreement, a laurel cloned from the specimen that Bécquer himself planted in his house in the center of Toledo has been planted in the park.
Strolling through the alleys of the imperial city, there are many botanical jewels linked to historical figures so present in the stories of the Puy du Fou park. It is in the street of San Ildefonso, where the house that Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer lived in, was where the laurel that he himself planted with his own hands still stands today. “Let’s imagine for a moment listening to Bécquer’s stories walking along the paths of the Puy du Fou park next to the real ‘son’ of the one the playwright planted in the city,” said Erwan de la Villéon, CEO of the park. «Without a doubt, it is something totally in line with our main objective, which is none other than to encourage our visitors’ interest in immersing themselves in their past; in the poetry and culture of other times.
Just a few minutes from the park, in the Cigarral de Menores (owned by Gregorio Marañón) there is a cypress planted by Galdós’s favorite nephew, José Hurtado de Mendoza, around which a beautiful legend revolves. And it is that, under the peaceful shade of this elegant tree, it is said that the first reading of the work «Bodas de Sangre», by Federico García Lorca, from the mouth of the Granada poet himself, could have taken place. Not far from there is also the hackberry of the hermitage of the Virgen del Valle, which not many know is believed to have been born around 1800, since it was already photographed in 1863.
De la Villéon declares that “Toledo is a living witness to the history and cultural evolution of society that, once again, allows us to travel in the first person through the centuries. Having in the park children of these historic Toledo oaks, hackberries and cypresses will mean having living witnesses to stories and legends so that our visitors can continue to be moved by their past in a more real way.”
In the words of Eduardo Sanchez Butragueño «being able to count on the support of Puy du Fou for this project is something very important in the educational and informative part of it. It is a collaborative project in which the Royal Foundation puts the idea, the concept and the selection of copies; the Ministry of Sustainable Development provides decisive technical support for the germination, cloning and reproduction of these trees; fundamental participation so that the project has gone ahead and, finally, Puy du Fou will be a strategic ally to generate activities that allow these specimens and the precious stories that revolve around them to be known, as well as the characters related to their plantation hundreds of years ago.
The reproduction of these specimens will also mean fixing their genetics, which has shown a great adaptation to our climate based on centuries of existence. They are plant species that have survived wars, hardships and even the Filomena snow storm.
Fernando Marchán, Deputy Minister for the Environment of the Community Board, has highlighted that «helping our citizens to value the importance of our environment, and seeking their complicity and involvement in conserving it, is everyone’s task. That is why we have to congratulate ourselves that, from the business world, or from civil society, they participate in initiatives such as this Historic Nursery, in which the Sustainable Development Department of the Community Board provides the vital technical part for the production of plants in the facilities of the Toledo forest nursery».
This action once again shows Puy du Fou España’s firm commitment to protecting environmental biodiversity and bringing to the present the memories and milestones of our ancestors.
