SUMMARY: Great place to take kids, especially small ones. Awful place for most adults, albeit with lots of really interesting plants.

It consists of a huge greenhouse and an outdoor space. The greenhouse, which is divided into several zones, houses exotic plants and trees, plus reptiles, insects and flamingos. The outside area has more plants, and a small farm/zoo-like area with various mammals. Its situated just a busy road away from Nice airport, so aircraft engine noise is a constant. It claims 2,500 plant species and 2,000 animals, but at a guess about 1,950 of the animals must be insects.

It’s a really strange place. First the bad news: it is mostly made up of grotty, poorly-maintained buildings and enclosures. It’s depressing. Badly signposted (no, make that signposting “terribly bad”), unclean in places (some of the benches you would not want to sit on), dingy almost everywhere. It’s like a tiny Disneyland resort that has been running for years on 1% of the budget it really needs. The vast majority of the plants are unlabelled, the different zones of the place are named in a totally unhelpful way, and this makes it difficult to navigate. My tastes will differ from yours no doubt, but I found the plants more interesting than the animals (despite that lack of labelling); the animals were in dirty, sad enclosures and cages. Most of the larger animals (mammals and reptiles) were lonely singles; I felt especially sorry for the poor porcupine, solitary in its small ill-kept enclosure full of drying dying weeds.

There is a snack bar. If you can get past its unnecessarily aggressive signs telling you not to drink or eat your own supplies, it’s OK.

And there is a new-ish, rather random-seeming, climbing experience place called “Accrobranche” (don’t worry, that is not a French word you don’t know, it is a made-up and never-explained name) with climbing walls, zipwires and so on. The website cleverly conceals the fact that you have to pay extra to use it – more than the cost of admission into the Parc itself! Mind you, that may be irrelevant as (a) most of its signs do not point you to the entrance so it is tricky to find (its signs are all typically aggressive signs forbidding entrance and denying use to in various ways rather than indicating the way in!) and (b) on the day I went it was closed because… the weather was too hot!

Top tip: Accrobranche has a grotty tiny sign saying “BASKETS OBLIGATOIRE” (which means TRAINERS are COMPULSORY, so if you are wearing climbing shoes, walking shoes, closed sandals, or any other sort of footwear, you’re out of luck.

Kids, especially little ones, won’t care about any of these problems. They’ll probably be enthralled by the marmosets, the lemurs, the sad old porcupine, the pigs, small crocodile, snakes and iguanas. The flock of beautiful pink flamingos and the colourful carp will be a highlight, and the insectarium is surprisingly interesting if you take the time to actually find the insects in their unkempt habitats and to read the (French only) curatorial notes. Some children will even be impressed by some of the tropical trees and exotic flowers if you point them out (smaller children especially will just walk past without noticing if you don’t invite them to look). The trees and plants are truly glorious, despite their environment.

So, I’ll probably go back in a couple of years, for the kids to see it again. But I won’t enjoy it.