Zoo · Theme Parks · since 1916

San Diego Zoo

A hundred acres in Balboa Park that started with the animals left behind when the 1915 exposition packed up and nobody knew what to do with them. A local surgeon heard a lion roaring from his office and founded a zoological society about it.

It is the place that worked out how to keep a giant panda alive outside China, and the one that pushed cageless enclosures decades before anyone else. The Safari Park up the road at Escondido is the same institution with the fences moved a very long way out.