Visiting Vienna

Vienna’s zoo features hundreds of different mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish and invertebrates. Here’s an overview of the top attractions.

Vienna’s zoo is the oldest working zoo in the world. Emperor Franz I, husband of Empress Maria Theresia, established a private menagerie here in 1752 and the public were let in at the end of the 1770s. But exotic animals were on display on the site as far back as the 1500s.

Vienna has plenty of rare sights, but perhaps none rarer than the Giant Pandas found in Schönbrunn Zoo.
According to the World Wide Fund for Nature, there are only about 1600 of these bears left. Most of them are in China, either wild, in reserves or in captivity. A very few (about a dozen) live outside […]

A little tip for those visiting Vienna’s zoo. If you make your way to the far side of the zoo, to the left of the elephant enclosure, you’ll find a path going up a wooded hill.
This eventually takes you to the Tirolerhof, a genuine farmhouse from the mountainous Tyrolean region of Austria.

The front. © Mark […]