The Ménagerie du Jardin des Plantes opened on 11 December 1794 inside Paris’s famous botanical garden, making it the second-oldest zoological garden in the world — only Vienna’s Tiergarten Schönbrunn is older. It was created in the turmoil of the French Revolution, largely stocked with animals brought from the abandoned royal menagerie at the Palace of Versailles.
More than 230 years later it is still open every day in the 5th arrondissement, run by the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, the national natural-history institution founded in 1793. That unbroken run places it near the very top of the oldest zoos in the world — a list it has been on since before the word “zoo” existed.
Key Stats
| Opened | 11 December 1794 |
| Location | Jardin des Plantes, Paris, France |
| Animals | About 1,000 |
| Area | About 5.5 hectares (13.6 acres) |
| Annual visitors | About 500,000 |
A Revolutionary Beginning
The menagerie was born as a scientific annex of the brand-new Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle. When the royal collection at Versailles was broken up during the Revolution, its surviving animals were moved to the Jardin des Plantes, joining exotic animals seized from street showmen. The result was a public, science-minded animal collection decades before London, Dublin or Amsterdam opened theirs.
Its historic buildings are attractions in their own right. The Rotonde, an elegant brick rotunda that once housed elephants, is today home to giant tortoises, while the soaring Grande Volière lets visitors walk among free-flying birds. In the 19th century the menagerie’s most famous resident was Zarafa, the first giraffe ever seen in France, who arrived in 1827 and lived here for 18 years.
Small, Rare and Remarkable
Squeezed into 5.5 hectares of city-centre parkland, the modern menagerie has turned its compact size into a specialty. Rather than elephants and giraffes, it concentrates on rare smaller and medium-sized species — red pandas, binturongs, snow leopards, takins and pudus among them — many of them part of European breeding programmes for threatened animals.
Around 1,000 animals live here today, and roughly half a million people visit each year, wandering a wooded corner of the Latin Quarter where enclosures sit beneath trees planted centuries ago.
Explore more: Explore more zoos and aquariums.
Ménagerie du Jardin des Plantes FAQs
When did the Ménagerie du Jardin des Plantes open?
It opened on 11 December 1794, during the French Revolution, making it the second-oldest zoological garden in the world after Vienna’s Tiergarten Schönbrunn.
What animals can you see at the Ménagerie du Jardin des Plantes?
About 1,000 animals live there, with a focus on rare smaller and medium-sized species such as red pandas, binturongs, snow leopards and takins, plus reptiles, birds and giant tortoises in the historic Rotonde.
Where is the Ménagerie du Jardin des Plantes?
It is inside the Jardin des Plantes botanical garden in the 5th arrondissement of Paris, and is run by the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle.
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Photo: Inkey / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.