The following is an excerpt from an article I wrote a few years ago about this zoo. It was published in International Zoo News, and described several zoos in this area of France. La Teste Zoo was not one of the finest!
A little further south, within striking distance of Bordeaux, is the rather odd Zoo de Bassin d’Arcachon. This is a wholly commercial venture, with some charm but, ultimately, little merit. Like Palmyre, it is located within a coastal pine forest, but it has little of the panache and none of the quality of its near neighbour, and consequently lacks the huge crowds which can be seen further north. What this place does have is a large collection of cats – I counted five separate enclosures for lions, for example, and four for tigers. There are jaguars and leopards, pumas and servals too, and while they all look to be doing well enough, none of their accommodation is state-of-the-art. Instead, there are a lot of very simple mesh cages, often adorned with slightly surreal furnishing (the largest lion cage is kitted out like a Roman ruin) or ‘enhanced’ by bizarre decoration (several of the animal houses are pained in a psychedelic style that might be described as California-surfer chic). There are chimpanzees on an island (new, apparently, but really pretty unexciting for man or beast); a single male elephant, ‘rescued’ from a circus and wearing an orthopedic shoe (the public were being invited to hand-feed this fellow, which seemed a fairly ambitious decision by the zoo’s management); some giraffes, zebra and hippos, viewable from a raised walkway; brown, Asian black and American black bears living together, apparently harmoniously; and quite a number of spotted hyenas. In tone and flavour, this zoo reminded me of some of those British collections which died out at around the time that Margaret Thatcher came to power, unmourned zoos in places like Coventry and Plymouth. The zoo’s marketing makes much of the fact that it is a place in which can be seen white tigers, white lions and white wolves. This says possibly all that needs to be said about the quality of this establishment.
