LUIS DE CAMÕES GARDEN

The park exudes a sense of yesteryear, with old ladies practicing tai chi and others playing mahjong, and scenes of everyday life rubbing shoulders with history. In the ^18th century, these gardens were covered with vegetation as dense as a primeval forest. They belonged to a high-ranking British official. In 1785, the French astronomer La Pérouse built an observatory on the hilltop. In 1835, the Portuguese built a grotto around the bust of their national poet, Luís de Camões. The story goes that Camões, a ^16th-century adventurous writer, composed part of his work Os Lusíadas(The Lusitanians) here. Behind the grotto, small paths lead to a pavilion with a view of Zhuhai and China.

The Plant Nursery, in the park, is a place steeped in botanical history. In the late XVIIIᵉ and early XIXᵉ centuries, English merchants and botanists collected foreign plants here for acclimatization at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, England. This practice enriched Macau's flora.

The Protestant cemetery at the entrance to the park, established in 1821 by the East India Company, reflects the religious diversity of the colonial era. Prior to its creation, Protestants could not be buried on Macau's sacred Catholic soil, nor on adjacent Chinese territory. The cemetery therefore provided a resting place for Protestant foreigners, including such notable figures as Robert Morrison, the first translator of the Bible into Chinese.