Welcome to Business Daily from the BBC World Service. I'm Jane Chambers. Today we're in Chile,

in the seaside town of Vinya del Mar, to find out how the country's oldest and most important

botanical garden is recovering after forest fires decimated it earlier on this year.

On the 2nd of February, this terrible accident

wiped out 90% of our land.

There were around 700 visitors in the gardens

that we managed to evacuate.

20 minutes later, the fire arrived

and consumed everything in its past.

It burned 360 hectares of the 400 hectares that make up the gardens.

That's Alejandro Perano, the Gardens Managing Director.

One family living in the grants didn't have time to evacuate, and sadly a worker,

her mother and children died, and many of our workers' houses have been destroyed.

For us, the harm to our staff is the saddest part of all this.

The rest we can recover.

We'll hear how the staff are determined to turn the tragedy

into something positive by making a new future for the garden and how businesses, volunteers and

individuals have been inspired to help the staff get this historical botanical garden back on its

feet.

Walls of flames swept forward by high winds have now pushed Chile into a state of emergency.

The country's president surveyed the damage from a helicopter and warned of a substantially growing death toll.

The forest fires happened during Chile's summer when there were scorching temperatures and high winds.

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