Qualla: Krefeld Zoo

Krefeld Zoo: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Anderas R, CC BY-SA 3.0. Shortly after midnight on New Year's Day 2020, the Monkey Tropic House at Krefeld Zoo caught fire. By the time the flames were extinguished, more than thirty animals were dead - among them two western lowland gorillas, five Bornean orangutans, and one chimpanzee. Massa was forty-eight. Boma was forty-six. Suria was three. The cause was three paper lanterns, launched into the cold sky over the Lower Rhine by a sixty-year-old woman and her two adult daughters who said they had not realised the lanterns were illegal in Germany. They turned themselves in the next day, in tears.

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Image: Anderas R | CC BY-SA 3.0

Krefeld Zoo: A Small Zoo in a Quiet Park

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit A.Savin, CC BY-SA 3.0. Krefeld is not a famous city. It sits on the western edge of the Ruhr, an old silk town with quiet streets and a park called the Grotenburg, where in May 1938 a modest Tierpark opened in half the park's acreage. The first director, Heinrich Janssen, came from the natural history ...

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Image: A.Savin | CC BY-SA 3.0

Krefeld Zoo: The Monkey Tropic House

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit KR-1 Werbeagentur, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Affentropenhaus opened in 1975 - two thousand square metres of greenhouse glass and steel, kept at twenty-six degrees Celsius, the climate of equatorial forest. Gorillas, chimpanzees, orangutans, marmosets, and fruit bats lived inside behind dry moats. Visitors walked among t...

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Image: KR-1 Werbeagentur | CC BY-SA 3.0

Krefeld Zoo: Three Lanterns in a Cold Sky

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit A.Savin, CC BY-SA 3.0. Sky lanterns - small paper hot-air balloons lifted by an open flame - are sold around the world as romantic New Year ornaments. In Germany they have been banned in most states since the late 2000s, precisely because of what can happen when one drifts unpredictably and lands while...

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Image: A.Savin | CC BY-SA 3.0

Krefeld Zoo: What Remains

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Magnus Neuhaus, CC BY-SA 3.0 de. The zoo is still there. A new gorilla garden, opened in 2012 on the other side of the park, kept two further groups of western lowland gorillas alive - including the silverback Kidogo, who in 2012 had briefly made world headlines by walking a tightrope strung between two trees. T...

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Image: Magnus Neuhaus | CC BY-SA 3.0 de

Krefeld Zoo: A Place to Visit Carefully

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Steffen Schmitz (more photos), CC BY-SA 4.0. Krefeld Zoo today asks visitors to remember that it is a working ark for endangered species - currently participating in forty-nine breeding programmes, including those for Sumatran tigers, snow leopards, black rhinos, and the otters whose European studbook the zoo itself maintai...

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Image: Steffen Schmitz (more photos) | CC BY-SA 4.0