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The Eden Project is an amazing place and cost £86.5m to build. The money was recovered within 2 years of opening. 1/2 million visitors went there to watch when the place was being built! I had to queue for miles to get in and it has been known on many an occasion that they have had to turn customers away as they were too full! The brainchild of Tim Smit, who also renovated and found the Lost Gardens of Heligan, the main "biome" houses a jungle (and temperature too!) and it is growing rapidly. The other main "biome" houses a more temperate zone consisting of Mediterranean climate and Californian desert. I enjoyed it so much I went round twice. The large waterfall pictured below falls within the jungle biome. The images of the biomes do not do them justice - they really are amazingly large. I understand it is intended to raise another biome, to depict the American Desert, complete with gophers! Taken From Internet News. 22 Sep 02. ST. AUSTELL (Reuters) - Thousands of people have been showing up to see a little piece of paradise blooming near the Cornish coast. The Eden Project, a collection of giant steel and plastic bubbles, known as biomes, that house some 250,000 plants at the bottom of a crater near St Austell, has exceeded all expectations. "In the first full year we had 1.97 million visitors. So far this year it looks very similar," operations manager George Elworthy told Reuters. The brain-child of maverick Anglo-Dutch businessman Tim Smit, the 88 million pound Eden Project only opened its doors to the public in March 2001 aiming at being an educational and a recreational facility. It has since become the third most popular tourist attraction in the country and its main difficulty has been coping with the people trying to get in despite the relatively high entry cost of nearly 10 pounds per adult. "The biggest problem we have had has been coping with the numbers. In the first winter we had to completely rebuild the visitors' centre, and have had to replan a lot inside the biomes," Elworthy said. "Our planning catered for 7,000 people a day at the peak," he said. "But our average daily throughput has been about that, and the peak has been double." The "biomes" are a cluster of giant domes constructed from a honeycomb of steel tubes holding hexagonal inflated bubbles of tough clear plastic. At present there are just two main biomes -- each with four segments -- that eerily resemble the magnified eyes of a fly. The climate inside the larger of the biomes measuring 240 metres (790 feet) long by 110 metres (360 feet) wide and soaring to a height of 55 metres (180 feet) is like that of the humid tropics. The dome contains thousands of tropical plants and trees and an artificial waterfall. A winding path takes the visitor through dense undergrowth. Each plant is identified with labels which explain what it is used for, such as house building material, fuel, food, clothing and medicine. The background rumble of the waterfall and regular squirts of water vapour into the atmosphere -- fuelled by both collected rain and ground water -- combine to give the impression of strolling through a rather overgrown sauna. The smaller biome harbours Mediterranean climate vegetation, is noticeably cooler, less humid and more familiar to Europeans. The themes of both are drawn together in a display in the visitor centre. A mobile display graphically illustrates the importance of plants in day-to-day life by steadily stripping away their products and by-products to leave a naked couple of dummies in what only minutes before had been a fully-equipped modern home. "We are now aiming specifically at children. Maybe we neglected them a bit initially," Elworthy said. "We are making Eden much more child friendly." The success is evident as crowds of youngsters gather round the "plant takeaway" display marvelling as it strips away the veneer of the civilisation they all take for granted. The Eden Trust, a registered charity that runs the project, is now starting to raise funds to add a third, dry tropics, biome which should be completed by 2005 if all goes well. "It was in the original plans but was dropped because of lack of funds," Elworthy said. And as the biomes multiply, so their contents also develop. "This is not a static display. It is literally organic growth. It will get better and better with age as the plants grow and mature," Elworthy said. Eden, 250 miles south west of London, has also spread its beneficial aura to much of the rest of the area, helping the recovery after the foot-and-mouth crisis that closed down much of the country last year at the peak of the tourist season. "Eden has been a big attraction for all of Cornwall because it has attracted so many people to come and visit us," Mary Prowse, manager of the tourist office in the southern Cornish port of Penzance, told Reuters. So far most visitors to the eco-bubbles have been from Britain -- leaving the rest of the world still to be tapped. "We estimate that 80 percent of our visitors have been domestic. We haven't hit the international market yet," Elworthy said. That ambition should receive a boost from November with the release of the latest Bond movie -- "Die Another Day" with Pierce Brosnan and Oscar winner Halle Berry -- part of which was filmed in the biomes. "That should certainly help," Elworthy said. "They spent four or five days filming in the biomes and then went away and built replicas of them for some action sequences. It would have been bad news if our domes had been damaged." |
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I wish to thank Tim and every one who has worked and are working to make this dream come true. |
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