The oldest botanical garden in France
The Montpellier Botanical Garden is a university botanical garden founded in 1593 and an integral part of the heritage of the Faculty of Medicine of Montpellier and the University of Montpellier. It is the oldest botanical garden in France before that of Strasbourg founded in 1619, the one of Paris created in 1635 and that of Caen in 1736. This garden has a triple vocation: botanical, historical and university.
When it was founded in 1593 by Pierre Richer de Belleval, Montpellier's garden of plants was intended for the cultivation of "simples", but Richer's project soon surpassed the only medicinal plants used to teach future doctors and apothecaries to become a real botanical study tool, unpublished at the time.
