Burgers' Zoo

Burgers' Zoo sits in the leafy eastern outskirts of Arnhem, about a ten-minute drive from the city centre, and it carries its 110-year history with genuine ambition rather than nostalgia. At 44 hectares it is large enough to need a full day — possibly more if you linger, which you will.

The real draw here is the series of vast enclosed biomes that Burgers' has been refining since the 1980s. The Desert dome is the largest climate-controlled desert habitat in the world open to the public, and walking into it feels genuinely disorienting — dry heat, free-roaming Hamadryas baboons, and roadrunners crossing the path in front of you.

The Ocean hall runs a serious coral reef tank alongside open-top shark pools, while the Mangrove building threads boardwalks through a humid Indo-Pacific ecosystem complete with free-flying fruit bats overhead and giant grouper below. The Bushland section replicates an Australian eucalyptus scrub with echidnas and wallabies at close quarters.

These are not glorified greenhouses with a few cages inside — the design philosophy here is genuinely immersive, and the animal welfare shows in the enclosure scale and complexity.

Burgers' contributes to European Endangered Species Programmes across several large mammal and reptile species, and its breeding records for okapi and Komodo dragons are well regarded in European zoo circles.

Visitor numbers tip past 1.5 million annually, so summer weekends around the Ocean and Mangrove entries can clog early. Arrive before 10 a.m. if you want the biomes before school groups arrive. Pushchair-friendly on most paths but the Mangrove boardwalks are narrow. Wear layers — you will move between tropical humidity and Arnhem's cool open air repeatedly throughout the day.