Charco del Ingenio has the only herbarium in the state.

Published October 23rd, 2021

During the ethnobotanical exhibition “Saberes heredados plantas nativas de Guanajuato”, the head of the National Herbarium highlighted that the Charco del Ingenio Natural Reserve has the only “herbarium” in the entire state of Guanajuato.

Gerardo Salazar, head researcher at the Biology Institute of the Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and head of the National Herbarium, pointed out that officially there are 68 Mexican herbariums in the international database and only one in Guanajuato, located in San Miguel de Allende within the Charco del Ingenio Nature Reserve.

This one-day ethnobotanical exhibition brought together Dr. Gerardo Salazar, who gave a lecture and explained what a herbarium is and its usefulness as an archive to learn about plants. He emphasized that the San Miguel herbarium is very well developed, but it is still limited, so at the national level they will give the Charco del Ingenio duplicate plants that they have in Guanajuato.

“The herbarium is the botanical museum, just as we associate the museum as a stuffed animal or a preserved skeleton or a skin, in the case of plants as they have a skeleton, cellulose, it is a plant material, we take a part of the silver, we dehydrate it with a little bit of heat and then we mount it on a cardboard and that way if it is kept in a place where there is no humidity, no pests, that record can last for centuries” explained Gerardo Salazar.

With this, he argued that Mexico has 5th place in biodiversity, and unfortunately it is not known.

Mario Hernandez, director of the Charco del Ingenio nature reserve in San Miguel de Allende pointed out that the exhibition and conference is part of a scientific investigation on the use of plants in the north and northeast of the State of Guanajuato, an investigation they are developing in coordination with the National Council of Science and Technology.

The results were exhibited only on Friday, October 22, 2021, and at 10:00 am and 12:00 pm on Saturday, October 23 in a special way, all due to the pandemic.