Elephant outdoors

A part of the enclosure for the female African elephants is now finished, the bull enclosure was already finished last year. The opening of the new enclosure will be Spring 2017.

Will there be anything particularly special abut the final paddock (beside the restaurant)?

The special thing will be that the cheetah will get access to the bull enclosure. The rest won't be very special, though there is a large pool, lots of feeding stations and they will get a group of helmeted guineafowls in the cow enclosure.

What is the size of the exhibit? If you know individual yards that would be even better.

The cheetah access does sound interesting, particularly as their enclosure could hardly be called large. Without knowing the ins and outs of the project, though, I got the impression it wasn't the most exciting development. As with the zoo itself, the tagline could've been: not as good as Zurich's.

Given the zoos limited space it is quite an exciting development and their elephant outdoor enclosure might well be better than the one in Zurich, though indoors Zurich will always be superb. Overall I feel it is unfair to compare Basel with Zurich, as they are completely a completely different type of zoo and Zurich has the space that Basel has not. But I would say Basel compares very favourable to most European city zoos and has with Gamgoas and Etosha two buildings that are among the best in Europe...

The comparison is perhaps unfortunate, but inevitable in a country with two major zoos. It's all subjective, of course, and may be apples to oranges, but is part of the fun of a discussion forum. I think my post came across as ****** rather than fun, though, which was neither intentional nor necessary. There are very few zoos in the world that match the quality of Zurich and Basel is certainly a fine collection.

As for the elephants, I think Zurich's exhibit gets undeserved bad press. Whilst it would be improved if another outdoor enclosure were added to the east, the structure of the exhibit, its configuration and the emphasis on enrichment are all superb. From a visitor perspective, even the costliest elephant developments in recent years have failed in their attempts at naturalism; Zurich achieved the near-impossible in constructing an exhibit that's immersive (in a loose sense), architecturally compelling and doesn't distract from the animals. It is stunningly well designed.

Having only seen an unfinished iteration of Basel's new enclosure, my comparison is fairly arbitrary, but I don't think it will be on the same level. Again, though, that's not to say it didn't look good, just perhaps not ground-breaking. I originally posted in the hope that that impression was wrong.

Certain Swiss zoos seem to have quite peculiar and imaginative ways of measuring their development sizes. Zurich's elephant park officially covers 11'000 m2, whereas Basel's Tembea officially will cover 8'300 m2. So how does Basel, a 13 hectare city zoo, manage to reserve almost as much space for its elephants as Zurich with more than double the area available?

Comparing the two on-site or with online maps, Basel's development seems about half the size of Zurich's. Measuring the actual development sizes with https://map.geo.admin.ch reveals that the 8'300 m2 in Basel is the actual development size, including visitor areas, barn, etc., whereas Zurich's official 11'000 m2, rather bizarrely, comprises the overall acreage of the indoor area but only the acreage of the actual outdoor elephant enclosure (i.e. without visitor areas). If one includes the outdoor visitor areas plus greenery, Zurich's elephant park is in fact somewhere around 18'000 m2 (4.5 acres) large with ~7'000 m2 for the enclosures. I have no clue why Zurich would under/over represent the actual size of their elephant park in such a strange way.

Tembea - like other recent developments in Basel, e.g. the ape/monkey-house - looks like a considerable improvement over the previous enclosure, but unfortunately nothing groundbreaking. Gamgoas and Etosha indeed remain fabulous.