The following is an extract from the IZN article I mentioned above. This was published in late 2009, and also featured comment on a number of other French zoos:
Returning to France this past summer, rather more than one zoo was on the agenda; a visit to the south-western corner of the country revealed establishments both decrepit and wonderful, both old fashioned and innovative. Without a doubt, the most impressive zoo in this region, and possibly one of the most impressive in all Europe, is The Vallee des Singes, close to the small town of Romagne in the Vienne départment. The Valle des Singes has been well publicised, within IZN and elsewhere, and whilst it is a specialist collection – and thus not to everybody’s taste – it must be said that it is fully meriting the approbation it has received. This is a great zoo, in every way: a great collection (big groups of gorillas and chimpanzees, woolly monkeys, white-bellied spider monkeys [Ateles hybridus], buff-cheeked gibbons [Nomascus siki – the only other group of these in Europe is in Mulhouse], crowned lemurs, geladas, spot-nosed monkeys, as well as many more frequently-seen primates), a great visitor experience (the grounds are beautiful, the interpretation is good, even the shop is a good one; only the rather mediocre café lets things down), and, above all, a great opportunity to see great groups of animals in great settings. Watching a dozen gorillas slowly emerging from the woodland of their island at feeding time ranks as one of the most wonderful zoo sights it has been my privilege to behold; seeing some of those same gorillas climbing thirty foot high trees was equally stunning. The novelty of walk-through enclosures for squirrel monkeys and lemurs is not what it once was, but here those walk-throughs are done particularly well. There isn’t a single poor – or even middling – exhibit here, but I particularly enjoyed the enormous island for mandrills, home to a troupe of about 16 animals. Nothing complicated, nothing fancy – just a fair amount of space, with plenty of trees, and some careful thought given to the places from which visitors can see the animals. It is a potent recipe. At its inception, Vallee des Singes was modeled on Apenheul in the Netherlands. It is my feeling that, in recent years, as it become more like ‘just another zoo’, Apenheul has lost some of what made it, once, one of the must-see collections in Europe. It is high praise indeed, but Vallee des Singes has the excitement, the boldness, the purity and the brilliance which once was Apenheul’s. And it is worth remembering that the place is only just over ten years old – it was opened to the public in 1998 – and that its first stage of construction was completed for just £2.1 million (Vermeer, 2000). More money has been spent, obviously, as the zoo has grown, but nonetheless this figure should be borne in mind by those collections which have spent very much more on very much less.
