Palmyre Zoo, Les Mathes

Palmrye Zoo is on the west cost of France in the Charente region, it's located between Saintes and La Rochelle. It boasts of having 1600 animal and being 30 acres of the most important zoological garden in France.

Finding the zoo is reasonably simple, unless you have a strange satnav (as we did) who likes to take you on a magical mystery tour first. For people without satnav, the roads are well signposted from several miles out.
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...all year: 9am-7pm April to September,
9am-6pm rest of year. Sea lion and parrot shows run from April to end of October. The zoo is wheelchair accessible. Parking is free, dogs are not allowed in the zoo, even on leads.

The entry price is reasonable at adults: Euro 14 and children 3-12: Euro 10.

Onto the animals themselves, there is a good range of animals, as you enter the park you are greeted with a flock of flamingoes. ... more

Palmrye Zoo is on the west cost of France in the Charente region, it's located between Saintes and La Rochelle. It boasts of having 1600 animal and being 30 acres of the most important zoological garden in France.

Finding the zoo is reasonably simple, unless you have a strange satnav (as we did) who likes to take you on a magical mystery tour first. For people without satnav, the roads are well signposted from several miles out.
General information on the zoo first. The zoo is open all year: 9am-7pm April to September,
9am-6pm rest of year. Sea lion and parrot shows run from April to end of October. The zoo is wheelchair accessible. Parking is free, dogs are not allowed in the zoo, even on leads.

The entry price is reasonable at adults: Euro 14 and children 3-12: Euro 10.

Onto the animals themselves, there is a good range of animals, as you enter the park you are greeted with a flock of flamingoes. There were actually far more flamingoes here than we saw at FlamingoLand in the UK !

My favourite animals are big cats, and they had a variety of cats here, jaguars, leopards and snow leopards, lions, tigers and cheetahs. The cats all had enclosures that seemed reasonably well thought out in terms of shade and privacy, toys and points of interest to keep the animals amused, but they seemed to be lacking a little in space. They were certainly smaller enclosures than any of the enclosures of the British zoos I've visited. We were lucky because we went early in the morning, on a day when the sun was struggling to come out, so all the cats were up an about, they all looked well fed and had sleek coats, except the cheetahs of course who never seem to look sleek, but instead looked rather fluffy. One poor cheetah only had 3 legs, but it didn't seem to be hampered by it, and looked to be quite happy racing around the enclosure playing with the other cats.

Monkeys and apes are also popular in the zoo, they have quite a large population of chimpanzees, orang-utans and gorillas. At the time we were they it looked like they had just finished building a new primate area, because you could walk thought the indoor section, but it was spotlessly clean and looked unused. Again the chimps, orans and gorillas looked in very good condition and had a nicely organised area, with plenty of climbing apparatus and space.

The zoo booklet and all the billboards in the immediate area show the polar bear as the main attraction. And whilst it'd been some years since I'd seen a polar bear, I wish I hadn't seen this one, because it was obviously quite mad. There were 2 bears, one was just calmly sleeping at the back of the enclosure, but the other was in the water, right at the front of the tank and just leaping up and down. It was jumping about 6ft up the side of the tank and then plunging to the bottom, before launching itself back up again. It was quite an horrendous sight to be honest. After trying to fathom out the sign beside the bear tank, we decided it looked like the bear had been rescued from either a circus or another zoo, but even though it is obviously in a zoo which cares about it's animals now, I believe it would be much kinder to put the bear to sleep because it doesn't look happy at all.

Another animal that didn't look particularly happy was the bull elephant. It had been separated from the other elephants by an electrified wire, and was extremely agitated. Later in the day the cows had moved to within 2 or 3 feet of the wire and the bull had calmed down, but again it was still quite distressing to see the bull so agitated earlier on.

There are many more mammals in the zoo, including zebra, rhino, wolves, hippos, lemurs, small monkeys, bats and kangaroos. All of which had reasonable enclosures and looked to be in a healthy state. My daughter's favourites were the baby goats, you can climb over the stile into the enclosure and pet the goats, my daughter for it highly amusing when one started nibbling on her pants. Unlike other zoos where animal petting is allowed I couldn't find any hand wash, so we had to rush past a couple of enclosures to find the toilets to wash our hands, and then back track.

Apart from the mammals, the zoo has a selection of birds, including macaws, flamingoes, ostriches and penguins. The parrots do a show during April to October, we missed the show however, so I cannot comment on how good it was.

The sea lions also do a show, and we caught the tail end of it. Sadly, being stereotypical ignorant English, we couldn't understand a word of it, and can only assume that the seals did as they were told, they certainly seemed to be doing plenty of tricks.

Finally there is a small selection of reptiles, with a few snakes and crocodiles, and some giant tortoises.

The zoo seems to do a lot for conservation and releasing animals back into the wild, which I think is very important in this day and age, the days of a zoo just being entertainment value for the public should be long gone, and they should all be looking at the bigger picture. This zoo is involved in the European Endangered Species Programme, which has breeding plans for endangered species. It has been involved with releasing the golden lion tamarins back to the wild in Brazil, and the scimitar-horned Oryx to Tunisia. It is a founder member of the Conservation of Animal Species and Populations (CEPA, an acronym which obviously doesn't match up, but actually stands for Conservation des Espèces et des Populations Animales). They also support the Kinabatangan Orang Utan Conservation Project, which helps Orans, the Association Européenne pour l'Etude et la Conservation des Lémuriens (European Association for the Study and Conservation of Lemurs), which obviously helps lemurs, and is a financial supporter of WAPCA (West African Primate Conservation Action) helping primates.

As I mentioned earlier we arrived about 30 minutes after the zoo opened, which was great because most of the animals were up and about, unlike as we were leaving about 2pm, when they were all lazing around having a siesta. Not so great was the fact that the keepers were still milling around in side many of the exhibits. Going to see the tortoises and seeing a keeper in there sweeping up around them just spoiled the whole effect.

Moving on from animals, you have the kiosks and restaurants. The souvenir shop was a little small, and the soft toys (which my daughter loves) seemed over priced, although this may have been because of the poor showing with the pound. If they were the same price last year when the pound was better the toys would probably have been in a similar price range to fluffies in UK zoos.

We were a little disappointed when we stopped for coffee and a crepe to find that the crepe machine (surely it's just a frying pan!!) was broken, so the kids just settled for hot dogs, which were huge and in a baguette rather than a bun, for 2.50Euro they were excellent value. The coffee shop was reasonably empty when we went in, which was good news because the chap serving the coffee was certainly not in a rush, and seemed to take an absolute age to make 4 coffees and open 4 bottles of coke, unless someone puts a rocket up his backside, I'd hate to be waiting on a busy day in the height of summer.

There didn't seem to be a huge amount of toilet facilities, I only recall seeing 3 or 4 ( not that I was particularly on the look out), and unless you found the disabled toilets (tsk, tsk) they were the awful standing up style toilets. Which I know are probably more hygienic in the long run, but I just can't get used to them at all. However, they were clean and didn't smell at all. I can't speak for the gents obviously, but never heard any complaints from the males in our party, except once from my son, who refused to use one set of gents because the saloon style doors had been hooked open. He's at that age were privacy is paramount, so he didn't want to be seen at all, luckily my brother in law unclipped the doors and my son was free to go!

Despite the obvious distress shown by the polar bear, the animals seem well cared for and the zoo seems to be doing a lot for conservation. So I would recommend this zoo, I know some people find all zoos awful, but without the money brought in by tourists a lot of valuable conservation work would go by the wayside.
 

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