Botanical Garden and Ephebus Theater

At a glance. Located next to the Valley of the Temples park, the botanical garden hosts thousand of plants and the evocative Teatro dell’Efebo. Did you know it stands on ancient Greek hypogea where a precious statue was discovered? Find it on the map and read the story below!

Good to know. The Agrigento Botanical Garden preserves around 20,000 plants representing over three hundred crops and species of the Mediterranean scrub. This wonderful green treasure, stretching across 7 hectares, is located just a short distance from the Valley of the Temples and the historic center of Agrigento: a perfect link between the ancient and new city. It represents a sort of “open-air museum” because, in addition to the plant heritage, it contains various fossil and archaeological remains such as hypogea and caves, which were used in different periods as dwellings, stables, and warehouses. In the 5th century BC, Carthaginian slaves, survivors of the Battle of Himera, extracted tuff blocks here for the construction of the Temples: quarrying activities that left behind a space subsequently re-naturalized by time and later reused. Furthermore, recent studies have clarified that the actual discovery site of the famous Ephebus of Agrigento, displayed at the Pietro Griffo Archaeological Museum, was right here, inside one of the garden’s hypogea.

The recent reopening of the Teatro dell’Efebo (Ephebus Theater), an open-air theater set below the evocative calcarenite ridge, was named both in honor of this discovery and in deference to the artistic-expressive code of performances linked to the Myth and history of Akragas. The Theater is perfectly integrated into the Garden, which is crossed by a series of pathways leading visitors to admire the various tree species distributed throughout the park, all illustrated and classified on special signs. Visitors can pause on the various terraces built on tuff benches to admire the Valley of the Temples.

The origin of the Garden is quite curious: starting from the 1930s and for many decades, it was an agricultural colony with socio-therapeutic purposes for patients of the former Psychiatric Hospital of Agrigento. It was opened to the public in 2002 after an initial careful restoration and repurposing of some spaces, also for cultural purposes, carried out by the Libero Consorzio of Agrigento, then the Regional Province of Agrigento. In the following years, thanks to a second intervention also by the Libero Consorzio of Agrigento, the Botanical Garden became fully accessible and visitable, both for its extraordinary botanical beauty and for the interesting cultural events that take place in the summer at the Teatro dell’Efebo.