@FunkyGibbon Thank you. The pictures pretty much reflect my feeling of walking around this zoo, of which I had higher expectations, but it started going wrong the moment I stepped into the African house and saw the slender mongoose enclosure of 4 square meters. It felt more like zootierliste bingo than a proper zoo visit part of the time... Though I found my visit a bit disappointing, I am very happy to have seen it and I very much enjoyed Nuremberg and Prague, both zoos are good contenders to join my personal top-10.
@lintworm The zoo has a number of excellent exhibits, and the collection is obviously almost peerless; the staff are also incredibly generous with time and access. These two facts, as well as an established forum 'take', leave people disinclined to criticise.
A more balanced take would be to acknowledge the above, but also point to the various fairly shocking enclosures that can be found around the zoo.
In my 'review' last year I said this:
"I saw a lot of small enclosures today and most were perfectly adequate even if they didn't set the world in fire but there were also some that really were poor as well. I think a different zoo would catch a lot more flak for them. Which begs the question are we being soft on good zoos or harsh on bad ones?"
I think the main problem is that for many zoo lovers a large part of what makes a good zoo can be explained by the collection (and even more of how many rare species are kept) and Plzen just scores insanely high in this regard. So if a zoo has such an insane collection, people are often just too baffled to acknowledge what is wrong and fail to criticize these part. This might change with repeat visits when the glamour is gone, but not for everybody.
I had a similar experience with Frankfurt's Grzimek house, when I first visited in 2012 me and a friend of mine were completely in love with the house and we went 3 times to the zoo in 1 week... When we both returned to the zoo in 2014 the Grzimek house was a disappointment, because we could see further than the collection only...
Plzen is a proper zoo and has quite some good parts, being a reptile, ungulate or larger carnivore would not be a bad thing, but I wouldn't want to be a mammal there. That said the lay-out and landscaping of the zoo is very pleasant as well.
