San Diego Zoo 

San Diego Zoo, USA: detailed description, address and photo. Types of animals, excursions to the zoo, reviews of tourists.

This zoo is incredibly popular – and deservedly so. The San Diego Zoo is home to over 3,700 animals of more than 650 species and subspecies. The organization that founded the zoo, San Diego Zoo Global, is the largest zoological society in the world, with a total of over half a million members. And the San Diego Zoo pioneered a conceptually new organization of open-air zoos, without cages to admire animals in their natural habitat.

This is one of the few zoos in the world where a giant panda lives. And in 2013, having adopted the experience of their Australian colleagues, a new Coalapornia branch was opened at the zoo – it is clear who lives there.

The current zoo grew out of an exhibit of exotic animals that was abandoned after the 1915 Panama-California exhibition ended. The plot of land was allocated to the zoo for permanent use in 1921, and a year later the animals moved here. The main ideologist of the creation of the park, Dr. Harry Wedgford, from the very beginning wanted to organize a zoo without cages, and the first zone of the zoo, free of fences (by the way, lions lived there), was opened immediately, in 1922.

The San Diego Zoological Garden pioneered a conceptually new organization of open-air zoos, without cages.

You can explore the zoo with an organized excursion that covers approximately 3/4 of the entire territory. The exhibitions are organized according to the principle of habitat, so in one you can see several different animals that inhabit a particular area in natural nature. The zones presented at the zoo are incredibly diverse: from African rain forests to arctic taiga and tundra. It is also home to some of the world’s largest poultry houses, where birds can fly freely.

Among the exhibitions opened in the zoo are such as “Monkey Trails”, where monkeys and other animals from the rain forests of Asia and Africa are collected; poultry houses with tropical and other birds; “Panda Track” with bamboo thickets and several species of pandas living in them (not only giant ones); a pool of polar bears (except for bears, here you can see polar foxes, wolves, cougar); “Ituri Forest”, which is a copy of the real African; “Odyssey of Elephants”; Gorilla Tropics, Absolute Primates (orangutans and siamangs); Bonobos zone of pygmy chimpanzees; a forest of incredibly interesting Malay bears; “Tiger River” with Malay tigers; the zone of snow leopards and, finally, the very same “Coalapornia”, where wombats, wallabies and kookaburras live along with koalas, as well as rare Tasmanian devils, which in the USA can be seen only in two zoos.

Over the years, the zoo has received numerous awards, including from the American and International Association of Zoos and Aquariums. The latter was awarded to the Zoo by the AZA in 2014 for its contribution to international work on the conservation of rare species.

In addition to a huge variety of animals and birds, the zoo has an impressive collection of plants, including rare ones, and an arboretum is open. For example, in the zoo you can see 40 varieties of bamboo planted for pandas and 18 species of eucalyptus, which koalas feed on.

Practical information

Address: The zoo is located in Balboa Park, at 2920 Zoo Drive. This is the western half of the park.

Opening hours: daily from 9:00 to 21:00.

Buy a ticket to the zoo online…

Entrance: daily ticket (includes sightseeing bus tour, Kangaroo express bus, Skyfari lift and scheduled show) 56 USD for adults (from 12 years old), 46 USD for children (from 3 years old).

Web site.

The prices on the page are for November 2019.

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