Tropical area

More stunning photos from yet another excellent-looking French zoo. After seeing the two zoos of Paris, I mistakenly made the assumption that the zoos of France were not up to the standards of Holland, Switzerland and Germany. Clearly this is not the case--I now have a growing list of "must see" zoos: Mulhouse, Doue, Beauvel, and now Champrepus for starters.

One can only hope Parc du Vincennes is being rebuilt at this level of quality.

Thank you, Reduakari ! It's right french zoos are not very present on Zoochat, so, with Antoine, we are uploading lots of photos of our country since some days...
French zoos are not as spectacular as german ones for example, because we haven't gigantic aquariums or giant indoor tropical houses...But lots of our zoos are very interesting for their outdoor exhibits, like Doué, Champrépus, but also la Boissière du Doré, Branféré, les Sables d'Olonne, la Haute-Touche, le CERZA...And of course Beauval...

To the list of excellent French zoos, I would certainly add Le Vallee des Singes - one of the great European zoos, with some truly brilliant enclosures (and a pretty good collection too!). And Amneville is a premier league place too.

I liked La Palmyre too

I visited Champrepus back in the mid/late 90s on a school trip - we only had a couple of hours there* but it was thoroughly enjoyable. I remember they had a young Grey-cheeked Mangabey at the time that was able to pass through the mesh of the exhibit and interact with visitors.

I got the feeling at the time they were in the process of transforming the place - they had just opened the big lemur islands. There were some quite exciting species for the younger me - the aforementioned mangabeys, Babirusa and Arabian Oryx. And looking through the gallery - I was surprised how much was familiar - the tiger exhibit is exactly as it was then. A nice place that I have very fond memories of.



*Over the course of one day we went to a cheese (Camembert) factory, a chocolate factory and the zoo. Was a long time before a day was so happy again...!

Thank you for your small report, Maguari ! Unfortunately, the Zoo de Champrépus reduced his collection : there are no more mangabeys and the last babirusa is died last year. But they improved the exhibits and some of the new enclosures (lemurs, african savanna, otters...) are very spectacular.

For 2011, the park is building a children's area for jackass penguins, wallabies, coatis and prairie dogs. ;-)

zoo de jurques is good too