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I have a soft spot for old zoos. Not the slick safari parks with monorails and outsized gift shops, but the ones where the gates and the shady gravel avenues have stood for two or three hundred years. The world’s oldest zoo, Tiergarten Schönbrunn in Vienna, opened as an imperial menagerie in 1752, and wandering through it feels closer to a palace garden than a modern attraction. If you want to map out a trip around the oldest zoos in the world, here is the route I’d send a friend on, running from the very oldest to the merely venerable.
One caveat before we set off: “oldest” gets messy. Royal menageries existed for centuries before any of these opened their gates to ordinary people, and a few sites argue over founding dates. I’ve gone with the year each place is generally credited as starting.
1. Tiergarten Schönbrunn, Vienna, Austria (1752)
If you only visit one historic zoo in your life, make it this one. It sits in the grounds of Schönbrunn Palace and began in 1752 as a private menagerie for Emperor Francis I, husband of Maria Theresa. At its heart stands an octagonal Baroque pavilion, now a café; ordering a coffee under its painted ceiling, with the animals arranged around you, is one of the odder pleasures in Vienna. The whole palace ensemble has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1996.
It hasn’t coasted on its history, either. Schönbrunn keeps roughly 700 species today, runs a respected breeding programme, and still keeps giant pandas, a real rarity in Europe; a cub was born here in 2007. Go early on a weekday if you can, before the families arrive and the panda enclosure turns into a polite scrum.
2. Ménagerie du Jardin des Plantes, Paris, France (1793)
Paris gave us the oldest civil zoo still running, and it was born out of a revolution. When the monarchy fell in 1793, the royal menagerie at Versailles lost its purpose, and its animals were carted to the Jardin des Plantes, joined soon after by creatures confiscated from street performers. More than two centuries on, the result is small, leafy, and deeply Parisian.
This is no place for big-cat drama. It is a garden zoo in the 5th arrondissement where red pandas, snow leopards, and a famous old reptile house share space with rose beds and wrought-iron glasshouses. Treat it as a peaceful detour on a day built around the Latin Quarter, and pair it with the Grande Galerie de l’Évolution next door.
3. London Zoo, England (1828)
London Zoo, in Regent’s Park, gave the English language the word “zoo.” It began in 1828 as a scientific collection for the Zoological Society of London, founded two years earlier by Sir Stamford Raffles, and only opened to the public in 1847. The list of former residents reads like a roll call of British childhood.
Guy the Gorilla drew crowds for years. Earlier, a black bear named Winnie, brought over from Canada during the First World War, so charmed a small boy called Christopher Robin Milne that his father borrowed the name for a certain honey-loving bear. Architecturally it is a listed-building safari too, from the 1934 Penguin Pool to the soaring Snowdon aviary. Book online and arrive at opening time to beat the school groups.
4. Dublin Zoo, Ireland (1831)
Dublin Zoo opened in Phoenix Park in 1831, which makes it the third-oldest scientific zoo still running anywhere, after Vienna and Paris. It started with a single wild boar and a small collection donated by London Zoo, then grew into one of Ireland’s best-loved days out.
The zoo likes to claim that one of its lions became the roaring MGM mascot; the story is hard to pin down, but Dublin did breed lions with real success from the 1850s, so it is not pure blarney. Today the African Savanna and Asian Forests give the animals proper room, all wrapped inside one of Europe’s largest enclosed city parks. Visit in the morning, then walk the rest of the park.
5. Berlin Zoological Garden, Germany (1844)
Zoo Berlin opened in 1844 as the first zoo in Germany, and today it holds a record that is hard to beat: more species than any other zoo on earth, well over a thousand. If your idea of a great day out is sheer variety, nowhere else comes close.
It also knows how to make a star. A polar bear cub named Knut, born here in 2006 and hand-raised after his mother rejected him, became a global phenomenon before his early death in 2011. The ornate Elephant Gate, with its pagoda roofs and stone elephants, is among the most photographed in the city, though much of what you see is a careful rebuild after the Second World War.
6. Melbourne Zoo, Australia (1862)
Melbourne Zoo is Australia’s oldest, opened in 1862 as the Royal Melbourne Zoological Gardens, and it wears that founding-era dignity well. The layout borrowed heavily from European pleasure gardens, with broad tree-lined paths, so even on a busy day it feels like a park you happen to share with lions.
The early decades were rough on the animals, as they were almost everywhere then, but the modern zoo has leaned hard into conservation, with breeding work for native species like the helmeted honeyeater and the eastern barred bandicoot. I loved the walk-through lemur and kangaroo areas, where the animals decide how close to come. It sits a short tram ride from the centre, in Parkville beside Carlton Gardens.
7. Philadelphia Zoo, United States (1874)
America’s first true zoo was chartered in Philadelphia in 1859, then made to wait. The Civil War intervened, and the gates only opened on July 1, 1874, which is why you will see two dates attached to it. On the charter, at least, Philadelphia wins the title.
The Victorian bones are still here, from the original gatehouses to a founder’s cottage that predates the zoo by more than a century. Its modern signature is Zoo360, a network of see-through mesh trails that let big cats and primates roam above the paths; watching a tiger pad along a tunnel over your head is a genuine thrill. Pair it with Independence Hall and a cheesesteak, and aim for a weekday in spring or autumn.
How I’d plan a trip around these historic zoos
You don’t have to choose just one. Most sit in cities you would visit anyway, so they string together easily. A few notes from my own trips:
Build a European rail loop. Vienna, Paris, Berlin, and London are comfortable train hops apart, and most sit close to a major station or city centre.- Book the big names online. London and Vienna in particular are cheaper and faster to enter with a timed ticket bought in advance.
- Go early. The historic enclosures photograph best in soft morning light, and you will beat the school groups that build from late morning.
The real reason to go is simpler than any founding date. People have walked through these same gates for the better part of two centuries, dragging children, falling in love, arguing about lunch. The animals change, and the science improves, but the habit of wonder stays exactly the same. That is what makes these old menageries worth the detour.