Budapest Zoo & Botanical Garden — Attraction in Budapest

If it was possible to leave 0 stars, I would. I have never once left a negative review, but the animal abuse I saw here cannot be ignored. The conditions these animals are held in are horrible, from the lack of space to the unsuitable habitats for winter animals such as the wolverine and the pallas cat. To give some context for the treatment of animals in this zoo, the Dublin Zoo in my home country of Ireland is 29 hectares, and holds around 400 animals. Budapest zoo is 18.4 hectares, and holds over 10000. I could not believe the minuscule enclosures housing the animals, in particular the savannah animals. There were three rhinos, each in a tiny enclosure and separated from one another. The marine house, housing multiple sharks along with other marine life, was unbelievably small and used lighting and warped glass to give the impression of bigger enclosures. The zoo even had farm animals such as cows and horses, none of which were in fields or suitable large pastures and were instead in tiny pens or small enclosures with concrete walls. The wild dogs, of which there were at least 20, were held in an undoubtedly unsuitable small rocky enclosure and were visibly restless. I can’t begin to describe the flamingo enclosure, in which there were at the very least over 50 flamingos, all with white feathers showing how they are not receiving the proper diet they would receive in the wild. All of these specific examples are just a few of the horrific environments these animals were kept in. The horror and sadness we felt seeing these distressed and mistreated animals led us to leave within an hour, and I am furious at the state of this zoo. The extremely low ticket prices now make sense when seeing the abysmal living conditions of the animals in this zoo. I am in disbelief that this mistreatment and cruelty of animals has received such high ratings, and I implore you to not give this zoo any money to continue mistreating these poor...

I wouldn’t recommend this zoo at all. First of all I have a lot of concerns about the animals. The animals live in poor conditions. They have small cages/enclosures and it’s all very dirty. Some of the animals are separated or completely alone, even the ones that normally live in groups. If you were lucky enough to see two animals, it was usually mother and child. The animals that are grouped have way too little space and live very crowded. A couple animals don’t even have water because the pools are dried out and they didn’t even bother to fix it. Same deal with some of the vegetation in the enclosures: sometimes there just wasn’t any. We even saw injured animals like a mouse missing an entire ear and with a very infected tail. It is no surprise that the animals that live there show agressive behaviour towards the visitors. The enclosures are also poorly divided, for example you had the African and the Asian elephants next to each other in separate enclosures and the African elephant only had space inside and none outside, the Asian elephants only had space outside and none inside. I feel very sorry for the animals. And if this isn’t enough to convince you not to visit this zoo, here you have a couple more reasons. The zoo seems very big but half of it are empty cages or enclosures where they put an ‘under construction’ sign. It’s not tourist friendly at all because all the signs are in Hungarian and the directions are very unclear. The gardens aren’t that impressive anyway. The only thing I enjoyed was the petting zoo, but even then I felt bad because they...

I don’t frequent many zoos but have visited some nature reserves in Europe. We choose to visit this one while in Budapest on holiday because of its reputation for beautiful architecture and honestly the good reviews people left on Google. Truthfully, we felt the conditions and the space for living of the animals to be appalling and I regret immensely supporting this enterprise. The Elephant House was an architecturally beautiful room, but it was exactly that - with a giant elephant standing in a room with a little hay at his feet. Whether or not there was a larger open area for him (I didn’t see it), the fact he just sits in a big windowed room that is barely as large as he is for any amount of time was truly devastating to see. We attended the gorilla family feeding advertised in the gorilla enclosure. This was slightly better as there was an outdoor portion but the indoor was ceramic floors with some hay and the feeding was a bucket of lettuce ends. The other large animals - giraffe, tiger, leopard - were housed in similar conditions. There was one solitary sea lion in its pool looking quite sad. We spent maybe 30 minutes there before we had to leave. The architecture is lovely, the park planning and greenery very nice, and the smaller animal situation seemed satisfactory, but the enclosures of the larger animals and the lives they live… perhaps a bit dramatic but if you want to feel good about yourself, do not visit. In its place, I urge everyone to consider visiting appropriate nature reserves or safaris in other locations / on...