Den Botaniek, the city’s botanical garden, sits behind a gate at Leopoldstraat 24, in the city centre. It is free, open from eight in the morning, and holds about 2,000 plants on less than a hectare. Since 2022 it has had a five-star neighbour, the Botanic Sanctuary, a hotel of 108 rooms in the buildings of the old Sint-Elisabeth hospital.

A garden for a hospital

The garden began as a pharmacy. In the 16th century the apothecary Peeter van Coudenberghe, who lived from 1517 to 1599, laid out a herb and plant garden for the Sint-Elisabeth hospital next door and used more than 600 different plants to make its medicines. A statue of him stands by the garden’s brasserie building. He kept a second garden of exotic plants outside the city walls, and the Spanish army destroyed it during the siege of Antwerp in 1584 and 1585.

The present layout dates from 1825. Before that, in the late 18th century, the site was the plant garden of the École Centrale, the French-era school, and then the hospital’s herb and vegetable plot. The doctor and botanist Claude-Louis Sommé gave it its current form and used it for lessons at the medical school. Pierre Bruno Bourla, the city architect who built the Bourla theatre at the end of Leopoldstraat, designed the entrance gate in 1826. The gardener’s house followed in 1870, and in 1878 the botanist Henri Van Heurck reorganised the beds. A natural history museum founded beside the garden later moved to the zoo.

The city took over the garden in 1926 and had it listed as a protected landscape in January 1950. An orangery followed in 1884, with rooms for teaching and exhibitions. Its facade carries the names of the Low Countries’ great botanists, Clusius, Dodoens and Lobelius among them, and busts of Linnaeus and de Jussieu.

Those names are the link to Leiden. Clusius had his books printed by Plantin in Antwerp, starting with his Antidotarium of 1561, and in 1593 he became the first prefect of the new university garden in Leiden, which grew into the Hortus botanicus. His planting lists were detailed enough for Leiden to recreate his garden near its original site. Leiden sells tickets. Den Botaniek is free.

The hospital next door

The hospital the garden served is older still. The hotel’s own history puts its start in 1226, near the Cathedral of Our Lady, and its move to this site, the Elzenveld, in 1238. A chapel and a Gothic infirmary followed in the 15th century, and the hospital passed from religious to civil management in 1798. The front building and main entrance date from 1836 and a new apothecary from 1847; that 19th-century apothecary survives with its cabinets and fittings. By the late 20th century the complex had become a congress centre and, from 2001, Hotel Elzenveld, and it had fallen into decline.

The property developers Eric De Vocht and Maryse Odeurs, a husband-and-wife team who run the IRET group, signed a lease in 2017. Restoration with AIDarchitecten took about five years, and the first guests arrived in 2022. The owners said Antwerp lacked “a hotel that paid rightful homage to Antwerp’s great past”. Their answer has 108 rooms in five buildings on a site of about 20,000 square metres, a spa of about 1,000 square metres with an 18-metre pool, and some of the city’s most decorated kitchens. The Michelin guide of April 2026 gives two stars to Hertog Jan at Botanic, run by Gert De Mangeleer and Joachim Boudens, and one to Fine Fleur, run by Jacob Jan Boerma and Thomas Diepersloot.

It has not been a quiet year. In October 2026 a fire damaged the hotel’s wellness area, and about a hundred guests were evacuated, the chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov among them. The same month VRT reported that the city’s 2024 regularisation of six planning violations, among them arches over the passage and the entrance canopy, had been annulled by the Council for Permit Disputes. A comfort room in early November was listed at about €500 a night.

Visiting

Of the two, the garden is the better reason to come to Leopoldstraat, because it gives away for nothing what the hotel sells: old walls and plants with a medical past. The city lists Den Botaniek as open daily, with free entry, from 8:00 to 20:00 in summer and to 17:30 in winter. The greenhouse with its cacti and exotic plants is temporarily closed. The pond and the frog pond have recently been renovated, with Monique Donckers’ artwork Greening II beside them, and the city notes that students use the garden to revise during exam periods.

In 2020 the former city poet Peter Holvoet-Hanssen renamed it the Tuin der Poëten, the Garden of Poets. The city’s own page still calls it Den Botaniek.