This 11 hectares garden, at Paraiso, 8 km east of Cartago, protects an invaluable collection of neo-tropical flora that is one of the largest in the Americas, including its pride and joy – more than 700 species of orchids.  The gardens also abound with palms and bromeliads, effusive as a Pisarro painting, drawing butterflies and birds by the thousands. Peak blooming is in springtime.

The gardens are named for the founder, Charles Lankester Wells, an Englishman who worked to collate a representative corpus of Central American flora. The garden, established in 1917, later passed to the North American Orchid Society, and is today owned and maintained by the University of Costa Rica.