HI all. Bumping up this very old thread... as I'd like to hear what people's latest rankings of the top 10 (or 20) zoos in Germany are. I'm aware of the top 50/100 in Europe threads -- but I'm wondering which zoos in Germany have improved in recent years vs declined.
I'm particularly interested in how people rank the zoos in the Ruhr Valley area as I'll have a couple days there soon. Thanks!
15 years is a long time....
Personally my favourite 3 German zoos are Cologne, Nuremberg and the Wilhelma in Stuttgart. Behind that is gets crowded with zoos like Rostock, Goerlitz, Leipzig, Munich, the Berlins, Frankfurt, Rheine and Dresden. I don't do rankings really so after my personal top-3 it is all fluid and can change with the day.
The Ruhr area in general seems an area that is slowly getting behind other German regions when it comes to zoos. For me Cologne is head and shoulders above the rest, but behind it there are a lot of zoos that have things going for them, but that also have plenty of stuff to fix. Most are owned by relatively poor cities, so investment levels stay behind compared to the richer south and the zoo-crazy (and EU funded) east. Probably Duisburg, ZOOM and Dortmund would be my picks behind Cologne. Wuppertal used to be a must-visit zoo but lack of investment and the disappearance of many many rarities mean that there has been quite the decline there. Duisburg is relatively stagnant too, but both Dortmund and Munster have seen some good investment in the zoo recently (at least in monetary terms, can't speak for the results).
For Germany as a whole I would say that apart from Wuppertal zoos like Frankfurt, Erfurt, Hagenbeck and Karlsruhe are struggling these days and they are getting behind their competitors. Especially in Frankfurt there is still a lot of good stuff around, but also an increasing part of the park that needs renovations, which tend to happen at a glacial pace. Leipzig is also not the promised land it once was. Gondwana is impressive but enclosure quality is very much a mixed bag and since then only the new rhino enclosures really delivered, with many of the new constructions being forgettable or small for their inhabitants by modern standards. New insights in husbandry mean that many of the earliest projects of Zoo Leipzig this century (most notably the ape house) are already outdated or too small (lions & elephants).
For rising stars look to the east I would say. Cottbus is showing what can be managed on a small budget with impressive budget enclosures for elephants, tapirs and the current renovation of the carnivore house looks very promising too. Tierpark Goerlitz is another one that is developing into a small but choice collection based primarily around Eurasian species. In the shadows of Leipzig Zoo Dresden is also developing very nicely and I am much looking forward to their upcoming orangutan exhibit. Zoo Magdeburg had a boom period from roughly 2008-2020, but with new management that seems to have stagnated and when it comes to species diversity it has already gone down sharply. Still much superior to what is was 15 years ago. Up north Zoo Rostock and Zoo Schwerin are quietly booming too, especially Rostock has some star exhibits these days with the new polar bear complex (including aquarium) and the Darwineum.
In the rest of Germany, Nuremberg has made the change from a small version of Tierpark Berlin into a place where they experiment with interesting species mixes, spacious naturalistic habitats and an increasing focus on smaller species. Nordhorn is probably the best children's zoo of them all, a fantastic domestic species area but the surrounding enclosures are also mostly very good, seals and leopards excepted. The Opel-Zoo in Kronberg near Frankfurt is also increasingly a competitor for Frankfurt with their new elephant habitat and plans for a new Asian zone with rhinos. They have gotten rid of their most outdated exhibits and are now slowly but steadily expanding and becoming the big-animal zoo of the region if Frankfurt isn't careful... Finally Osnabrueck has also gone through extensive modernizations, but most of it isn't really to my taste and somewhat tacky. Most of it is pretty solid though...
although distinctly not in the running for one of the best German zoological collections around, I think the only major gap on that list is Hamburg - which is a must-visit purely for the historical context it provides.
