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Parc Samà
Parc Samà is a romantic garden, French parterres, a poetic and abstract forest, plane trees and reeds coexist with wisteria and bougainvillea. More than eight hundred palm trees, magical oak trees and elegant cedar and pine trees surround a lake where the ducks and turtles live. Peacocks and pheasants play around its waterfall, witnesses of our visit. Parc Samà is a companion for our feelings, freedom and encounters. It is romanticism, it is the garden of Parc Samà.
Parc Samà
General information
Some highlights about Parc Samà, in Cambrils (Spain)
Type of historic garden
Botanical gardens
Size
14 ha.
Location
Carretera de Vinyols s/n 43850 Cambrils
Tarragona, Catalunya, Spain
Coordinates: 41.10441, 1.02242
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Timetables
Check the timetables on Parc Samà's web
Tickets
Buy on Parc Samà's web
Contact information
Web: parcsama.es
Email: info@parquesama.com
Phone: +34 977 826 514
Access
From Tarragona: 20 minutes by highway (A7) and local road (T-312 and T-314)
From Cambrils: 5 minutes by T-312 road
Parc Samà
Natural environment
The environment of Parc Samà is Cambrils - Costa Daurada, a territory privileged by its geography, beaches and mountains, its climate, cultural and natural heritage, Mediterranean landscape, first-class gastronomy and infrastructures. All these attributes make it one of the most important tourist destinations in Spain.
Parc Samà
Historical background
The Park was created and promoted by Salvador Samà i Torrens, Marquis of Marianao, heir to a Catalan family established in Cuba. The project was commissioned in the year 1881 to Josep Fontserè, author of the Park of the Ciutadella de Barcelona and with Antoni Gaudí as assistant.
Parc Samà is a roundtrip, a journey of emigration and return. Dreaming of America, coming back and leaving a legacy. Other trees, other birds, others costumes and colours, other arts… Adventure, culture and wealth. Parc Samà is the history and the story of the Marquisate of Marianao.
Parc Samà
Description
Parc samà is a romantic garden, French parterres, a poetic and abstract forest, plane trees and reeds coexist with wisteria and bougainvillea. More than eight hundred palm trees, magical oak trees and elegant cedar and pine trees surround a lake where the ducks and turtles live. Peacocks and pheasants play around its waterfall, witnesses of our visit. Parc Samà is a companion for our feelings, freedom and encounters. It is romanticism, it is the garden of Parc Samà.
An eclectic garden
The search of perfection finds its place in an elegant chaos, in the harmony of nature itself. Built in the image of the English gardens, Parc Samà proclaims freedom from its Romantic conception, as if the park was an improvised creation. Without giving up its organised outlines that follow the French style, the park is mainly romantic and poetic, more or less dense and wild, formed mostly by open spaces and important botanical species.
It is clearly an eclectic garden which combines styles such as Italian Renaissance or English Romanticism, including in this last case their three basic elements: the landscape, which involves leaving out statues, buildings and other elements, as in the rear area of the Palace of the Lake; the poetic, which introduces artificiality and decorative elements, as the Lake or the Waterfall; and the abstract art, the Forest.
Animal welfare
Within this exotic and wild variable, many gardens of the time contained collections of animals (deer, pheasants, peacocks…). In the case of the Parc Samà, and following the idea of the founder of the Salvador Samà i Torrens to recreate a garden that would transport the visitor to colonial Cuba, the park housed different collections of animals, among which the birds brought from Central America stood out.
The garden of today recovers this dimension, focusing on the fondness of its founder in the collection of ornamental birds from the new world, but adapting this concept to the XXI century, where animal welfare is the absolute priority. The animal collections that the Parc Samà houses are intended to serve as a classroom for education and conservation, where the visitor can admire, enjoy and understand closely the wonderful world of birds, deer, turtles, etc.
Parc Samà
Chronology
- 1881
Salvador Samà commissioned the construction of the park in 1881 as his private resting place.
Parc Samà hosted the visit of King Alfonso XIII and Queen Victoria Eugenia and headquarters of numerous meetings and political conventions. - 1920
In the 20’s, the Development Council carried out different botanical experiments in the Parc, especially tests which expected to exterminate the olive tree fly. - 1936
But Parc Samà was also a witness to the Civil War. In 1936 the park was used exclusively for military purposes. The palace and gardens were confiscated by the Comitè Antifeixista de Cambrils and the site became a Military Instruction Centre where thousands of soldiers passed through and after a few days were sent to the trenches. - 1938
In 1938 the Park took in the soldiers of the "Quinta del Biberón" who, after receiving military instruction for just three days, were sent to the Ebro or Segre lines. At the end of the same year, a "Hospital de Sang" or field hospital for the war wounded was set up within the enclosure. - Post-war period
The post-war period brought changes and what was once a hunting estate became an agricultural estate. Olive trees, vines and hazelnut trees were planted. A wine cellar and a press were built where Muscatel wine was made and sold directly.
In this new stage, Parc Samà hosted the first editions of the Cambrils International Classical Music Festival. Salvador Samà i Coll, a music lover, was the driving force behind this festival together with Lluís Recasens, the mayor of Cambrils at the time. Salvador Samà gave the garden to hold concerts there, where José Carreras and Monserrat Caballé, among others, performed. - 1981
Alfonso de Fontcuberta, VII Marquis of Marianao, received the park as a donation from his mother in 1981 and made the second great change to the park: he restructured the estate, invested in machinery, planted new trees such as almond and peach trees, and marketed the produce wholesale. He put in drip irrigation throughout the estate and for all this he received the Deu award from the Institut Agrícola de Catalunya as a model farm.
Alfonso de Fontcuberta realised that the park had become a centre of reference for tourists and, after a trip to California, he copied the model of visits to places with cultural and leisure attractions and so began the tourist visits and the commercialisation of the park through intermediary agents. In this sense, it could be said that Parc Samà was the first leisure park in Spain.
Parc Samà
Museum
Museum space in the premises of the old winery and oil press, being a sample of agricultural production in the area and an experimental space where you can taste original cuisine products from the area of high quality as vermouth, olive oil, nuts, etc.