How many zoos does Germany have?
Depends on who you ask. The zoo association counts about sixty. Count every wildlife park, bird park, and farm with a petting enclosure and a sign at the gate, and you’re past a thousand.
Either way, we Germans are zoo people: the big scientific zoos alone log more than 40 million visits a year, and the oldest zoo association in the world is a German one, founded in 1887.
Almost every zoo on this page is a tram ride from a main train station. No car needed (except once, and I’ll get to that).
Berlin: One City, Two Zoos
The Zoo Berlin opened in 1844, which makes it the oldest zoo in Germany and one of the oldest anywhere. It’s also the most visited zoo in Europe, with around 1,000 species on 33 hectares (about 82 acres). You enter through the Elefantentor (Elephant Gate) of 1899, two stone elephants carrying a pagoda roof, right next to Bahnhof Zoo. Yep, the station is named after the zoo, not the other way around.
The stars are the giant pandas, the only ones in Germany. Meng Meng and Jiao Qing arrived from China in 2017, and their daughters Leni and Lotti were born right here in 2024. Go in the morning if you want to see them do anything but sleep.
Then there’s the Tierpark in the former East, out at Friedrichsfelde. East Berlin had no zoo when the city was divided, so it built its own in 1955, and it built big: 160 hectares (about 395 acres) of parkland around a palace, the largest landscape zoo in Europe.
Which one you should pick? Half a day: the Zoo. A whole day and no crowds: the Tierpark.
(My heart says Tierpark. My feet usually agree.)
Hamburg: Where the Modern Zoo Was Invented
Every zoo where a moat replaces bars owes something to Hamburg. Carl Hagenbeck, animal dealer and circus man, opened his Tierpark in 1907 with what he called panoramas: animals on terraces, separated from the public and from each other by ditches instead of cages, so that lions appeared to share a landscape with zebras. Zoos worldwide copied it. The original panoramas are still there, and the whole park is a listed monument.
Hagenbeck keeps one of the largest elephant herds in Europe, plus a separate Tropen-Aquarium (tropical aquarium) with its own ticket. Give the two together a full day.
One correction to what half the internet still says: you can’t feed the elephants here anymore. If that’s what you’re after, read on.
Leipzig and Hanover: Zoos That Feel Like Trips
The zoo in Leipzig built Gondwanaland, the largest tropical hall in Europe: 16,500 square meters (about 178,000 sq ft) of rainforest under one roof, 25 °C (77 °F) all year, with a boat ride along an indoor river. In January, when Saxony is gray and 2 °C (36 °F), that alone is worth the ticket.
Next door, Pongoland houses all four great apes, with a Max Planck research station attached. Scientists watch the apes while you watch the apes. ;-)
Hanover‘s Erlebnis-Zoo (adventure zoo) went the theme-park route, with worlds called Sambesi, Yukon Bay, and Outback. The Sambesi boat ride is included in the ticket and floats you past zebras, giraffes, and flamingos. Summer only, though. In winter the boats are in dry dock.
Cologne, Frankfurt, and the Taunus
Frankfurt‘s zoo (1858) and Cologne‘s (1860) are numbers two and three on the age list, and both were founded by citizens, not kings.
Cologne still has its Moorish-style elephant house from 1863, though the elephants moved to a two-hectare (five-acre) park in 2004. The Hippodom, an African river landscape under one roof, is the other big draw. And the most famous resident isn’t exotic at all: Hennes, the billy goat mascot of 1. FC Köln, lives here between soccer matches.
Frankfurt is smaller, but it has the bigger name. Bernhard Grzimek ran the zoo from 1945 to 1974, rebuilt it from rubble, and became one of the most familiar faces on German TV along the way. His film “Serengeti Shall Not Die” won the Academy Award for best documentary in 1960, the first Oscar ever for a German documentary. Say “Serengeti” to any German over fifty, and we think of Grzimek before we think of Tanzania.
Half an hour north of Frankfurt, the Opel-Zoo in Kronberg im Taunus was founded in 1956 by Georg von Opel of the car dynasty. Here you can do what Hamburg no longer allows: buy a bag of zoo feed at the entrance and hold it out to the elephants—the only ones in Hesse. There’s camel riding for the kids, and you can bring the dog.
Don’t empty the feed bag on the goats at the first enclosure, OK? The elephants come later.
Munich and Stuttgart
Munich‘s Tierpark Hellabrunn (1911) lies in the meadows of the Isar south of downtown, and it invented something too. When it reopened in 1928 after going broke in the inflation years, director Heinz Heck arranged the animals by continent instead of by family, the first geo-zoo in the world. Result? You walk from the Arctic to Africa to Australia.
Stuttgart‘s Wilhelma began as no zoo at all. King Wilhelm I of Württemberg had a bathhouse built in Moorish style from 1842 on and kept adding: pavilions, greenhouses, a garden with fountains, and a lily pond. Animals arrived only after the war. Since then the Wilhelma has been the only combined zoo and botanical garden in Germany. Its Terra Australis house has koalas and the only quokkas in Europe. Come in April for the magnolias, and I’m serious about that.
Dolphins, Safaris, and Wildparks
Only two German zoos keep dolphins: Zoo Duisburg (since 1965) and the Tiergarten Nürnberg (since 1971), whose Delfinlagune (dolphin lagoon) is the only open-air dolphin pool in the country. Duisburg, by the way, is at least as famous for its koalas.
Then there’s the exception to the no-car rule. The Serengeti-Park in Hodenhagen (in the Lüneburg Heath) is the largest safari park in Europe: 220 hectares (about 545 acres) with lions, giraffes, and rhinos, and you drive the 10 km (6 mi) route in your own car. No convertibles, no getting out, and the last entry into the animal area is well before closing time.
There’s a bus if you come by train, and the park shuts down for the winter.
And finally, the Wildparks. Germany has around a hundred of them: deer, wild boar, wolves, and lynx in big forest enclosures, often cheap and sometimes free. The German Wild Game Route in the Eifel strings several of them together. If your kids have seen enough giraffes, this is where you go.
Before You Go
A few words about words. Zoo and Tiergarten mean the same thing. A Tierpark is usually bigger and greener, but not always (Hagenbeck calls itself one). A Wildpark keeps native animals. A Streichelzoo is a petting zoo.
The big city zoos open every day of the year. Bringing your own food is fine everywhere. Feeding the animals is fine in some places and forbidden in others. So read the signs. Weekday mornings beat weekend afternoons, every time.
For the rest of a family trip, see my pages on theme parks in Germany and tourist attractions in Germany. And if the weather turns, Leipzig, Berlin, and Hamburg each have an indoor world you can lose an afternoon in. Bring a sweater for Leipzig anyway. The walk from the tram is colder than the rainforest. ;-)