First of all, let me tell you where you will find this place……it is near the little town of ST. AUSTELL, in the county of Cornwall, in the South West of ENGLAND. On arriving, you look down onto huge greenhouses in the shape of domes. These are called ‘Biomes’. They look like giant bubbles, made up with hexagon ‘windows’, similar to a honeycomb pattern.

The Eden Project was opened on March 17^th  2001. The site is built on an old exhausted china clay pit called Bodelva, which was acquired in 1998 by the Eden Trust (a registered charity.)

Then,(in 1998), it was a huge pit, over 60 metres deep, and the size of 35 football pitches, without any level ground or soil, so there was a lot of work to be done, to move 1.8 million tonnes of dirt, which took 6 months with the use of 12 dumper trucks and 8 bulldozers.

These ‘windows’ which are of transparent foil, and made up of 3 layers of ETFE (ethylenetetrafluoroethylenecopolymer),which has a life span of over 25 years, form inflated pillows of a 2 metre depth. They are much lighter than glass, weighing actually less than 1% of the equivalent area of glass.

The steel work is very light, and there are no internal supports.

A water drainage system had to be set up, due to the large volume of water running into the site.

 This now collects on average, 22 litres per second or 20000 bathtubfuls a day, which is used for the plants and irrigation and needs of the visitors.

 A lot of rainwater is used inside the Biomes for the misty rainforest atmosphere.

The land slopes had to be terraced and stabalized, before being sprayed with plant food, and then 85000 tonnes of (recycled waste) soil was brought in, so that over 5000 types of plants could be planted.