El jardín de los gatos

Above, some of the more accommodating cats spotted
on a recent afternoon in Buenos Aires' botanical garden.
Photos courtesy of Iain Steel, June 2012.

"Cats here, cats there, cats and kittens everywhere. Hundreds of cats, thousands of cats, millions and billions and trillions of cats."
                            --From Newberry award-winning children's book, Millions of Cats, Wanda Gág, 1928

When I was a little girl, one of my favorite books was called Millions of Cats, a brilliant illustrated book from the 1920s about a lonely aging couple who end up caring for an endless parade of domestic felines. This context perhaps explains why the Buenos Aires botanical garden is fast becoming my favorite haunt in South America. 

For years it's been the dumping ground for unwanted pet cats. A newspaper article published a decade ago lamented that such a prized public space boasting tropical flora and fauna had become the refuge for so many cats. Of course, in my opinion, the cats are the botanical garden's best feature. A lovely team of volunteers puts out 8 kilos of cat food and plenty of water around the park for the ever swelling cat army. It's really lovely to see an old person sharing a bench with one of these cats, or a young couple sharing an ice cream. Iain and I took my mom there recently to scope out the cats in the hope that I might find one to adopt, so that there is "one fewer cat in the cold," as the Comisión Proteccionista Gatos Botánico advertises in its new poster, featuring a cat in a winter hat.