Moscow Zoo

Moscow Zoo is one of the oldest zoological parks in Europe, founded in 1864, and the sixth-largest zoo in Russia by area. It welcomes up to 3.8 million visitors a year, making it one of the most visited zoos in the world, and its collection numbers more than 1,200 species with over 10,000 individual animals. The zoo serves as the headquarters of the Eurasian Regional Association of Zoos and Aquariums and takes part in programs to conserve rare species. It is located near the Garden Ring, between Krasnaya Presnya, Bolshaya Gruzinskaya, and Zoologicheskaya streets.

The idea of establishing a zoological garden in Moscow was put forward in 1857 by the zoologist Anatoly Bogdanov, and the committee of enthusiasts for acclimatizing fauna and flora that formed around the project was headed, as honorary patron, by Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich the Elder. Land was secured only in 1863, in the area of the Presnya ponds, instead of the originally planned Neskuchny Garden. The grand opening took place on January 31 (February 12), 1864: seven pavilions housed about three hundred animals of 110 species, including tigers, leopards, and a rhinoceros, and toward the end of the decade Emperor Alexander II presented the garden with its first elephant, named Mavlyuk.

The garden’s early decades were difficult: revenue was not enough to maintain the animals, part of the collection was sold abroad, and leasing it to private operators in 1874 and 1903 only deepened the decline. In the autumn of 1905 the garden found itself at the epicenter of the fighting on Presnya and suffered serious damage — buildings, the archive, and the library burned down, animals died, and in 1913 it was flooded. Only the dedication of a handful of staff saved the garden from complete ruin after the revolution.

The decisive step was nationalization by decree of the Council of People’s Commissars on March 27, 1919, and after coming under the authority of the Moscow City Council in 1923, the city began allocating serious funding for development. In 1924 the garden was given the neighboring 12-hectare Morozov Park, and to a design by architect Konstantin Gippius, artificial hills known as “Animal Island” and “Turya Gorka,” a monkey house, and the “Polar World” pavilion were built on the new grounds in 1925–1927. The opening of the new territory on October 3, 1926, drew 30,000 visitors in a single day and prompted the renaming of the “zoological garden” to “zoo.”

By the end of the Soviet era, the zoo’s facilities had fallen into disrepair: from 1990, with the support of Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, director Vladimir Spitsyn launched a large-scale reconstruction, during which a pedestrian bridge across Bolshaya Gruzinskaya Street was built by 1997 and the “Birds of Prey Cliff,” “Australia,” and “South America” exhibits were opened. The Great Pond, dating back to the garden’s founding in 1864, has survived on the grounds to this day.

For its 150th anniversary in 2014, the zoo once again renovated its old territory, refurbished dozens of enclosures, and opened a greenhouse with more than a hundred species of tropical plants, and in 2017–2019 it carried out a comprehensive reconstruction in line with international standards of animal care. The zoo’s living symbol remains the wild Pallas’s cat (manul), whose image was fully restored as the zoo’s logo in 2019, for its 155th anniversary.