Bioparc Valencia: The Complete Visitors’ Guide

Most zoos begin with a fence and an apology. This one begins with a lemur sitting in the middle of the path, looking you up and down as if you were the exhibit — which, in a sense, you are. The Bioparc is Valencia’s great animal park, a ten-hectare slice of Africa rebuilt at the green, western end of the old Turia riverbed, and it runs on a single, radical idea the Spanish call zoo-inmersión: the barriers are there, but they are moats, rivers, glass and rock, hidden so cleverly that for long stretches you stop seeing a zoo at all and simply seem to be walking through the savanna, the equatorial forest and a Madagascan island, with the animals going about their business a few metres — sometimes a few centimetres — away.

It makes an odd, satisfying pair with the aquarium at the riverbed’s other end: eight kilometres of park apart, the Bioparc covers the land half of the natural world while the Oceanogràfic covers the water, and together they are the two big animal days out in our Best Things to Do in Valencia guide. This guide walks the Bioparc habitat by habitat — the rhinos and lions of the dry savanna, the giraffes of the wetlands, the elephant herd under its baobabs, the gorillas of the equatorial forest, the hippos of the Kitum cave and the free-roaming lemurs of Madagascar — with the honest practical picture on tickets, timing and how to get there, because this is a half-day visit that families happily stretch to a whole one.

The Short Answer

Yes — the Bioparc is the best zoo in Spain by most reckonings, and one of the best in Europe; if you are travelling with children it is close to unmissable, and if you are not, the design alone is worth the trip across the city. Give it three hours at an absolute minimum and four or five if you can: the park is a single, looping journey through Africa, and the visitors who try to sprint it in ninety minutes leave having seen the elephants and missed the point. At around €31 at the gate for an adult at the time of writing it is one of Valencia’s pricier tickets, which makes it the one animal ticket to sort out ahead — online prices undercut the gate and, more importantly, skip the weekend queue. Arrive at the 10:00 opening, walk against the first rush to the far habitats while the animals are still active, and let the day settle from there.

The Place in Brief: Africa at the End of the River

To find the Bioparc, follow the Turia gardens to their source. The park stands in the Parque de Cabecera, the big green headland where the old riverbed begins in the west of the city, on Avenida Pío Baroja — about as far from the City of Arts and Sciences as Valencia allows, and deliberately so: where the aquarium rises in white concrete at the river’s mouth end, the Bioparc disappears into greenery at its head. It opened in 2008, replacing the city’s old-fashioned Viveros zoo, and the difference between the two is the whole story: out went the cages, and in came landscapes — some 100,000 square metres of recreated African habitat, built by the Rain Forest group, holding thousands of animals of well over a hundred African species, every one of them from the one continent.

The trick is in what you cannot see. Between you and a white rhino there is a dry moat sunk below the path’s sightline; between you and a lion, a sheet of water and a fall of land; between you and a gorilla, at the famous close-up window, a pane of glass doing the work of a forest clearing. The park’s kopjes — those granite boulder piles that stud real savannas — are here sculpted rockwork, its baobabs are built as faithfully as its rivers are dug, and its planting is subtropical Valencia doing a passable impression of Africa in the rain. The result, on a good morning, is a genuine suspension of disbelief: no bars, no wire, no concrete yards — just paths that keep delivering you, habitat by habitat, into somebody else’s landscape.

The route is one long, logical journey. You enter past the lake and the giant elephant sculpture that guards the plaza, and the park unfolds as a tour of Africa’s great ecosystems in sequence: the dry savanna first, then its greener wetlands and the baobab forest, down into the equatorial forest, through the Kitum cave, and out at last onto the island of Madagascar. Built into the day are the park’s quieter pleasures, too — an open-air amphitheatre where a free-flying bird exhibition runs through the day, keeper talks at the big habitats, and a restaurant terrace that overlooks the savanna, so lunch comes with giraffes. It is a zoo designed less like a museum of animals than like a walk through a continent, and it rewards being treated that way: slowly, and in order.

What to See: The Dry Savanna

The first great space of the park is the dry savanna, a broad, dusty plain of red earth and kopje rock built on the scale its animals demand — and the animal who owns it is the white rhino. Bioparc’s rhinos share their plain the way rhinos do in the wild, in loose, unbothered company: Grant’s zebras graze the same ground, ostriches stalk the margins, and sacred ibis pick through the hay at the rhinos’ feet, stealing it strand by strand from under a tonne of nose. It is the multi-species idea working exactly as intended — stand at the rail long enough and the plain stops being an enclosure and becomes a scene, with its own weather and its own slow dramas, and now and then a rhino breaks into a gallop that reminds you how much animal is actually inside the armour.

Watch the zebra foals if the season has produced them, and give the plain’s smaller cast their due: impalas and waterbuck at the grass edges, the ostriches’ permanent air of outrage, the ibis working their long con at the hay piles. Then look across the water to the savanna’s second act. The lions have their own kopje on the far side, separated from their prey by the lake and a fall of ground — close enough to watch, far enough to be safe, which is precisely how it is on the real savanna — and there is a viewing window where the pride’s great male is liable to be asleep against the glass, at a range that makes the hairs rise on your arms. Lions sleep most of the day in any zoo on Earth; in this one, at least, they do it magnificently, and at eye level.

What to See: The Wetlands and the Baobab Forest

Where the dry plain’s circuit bends, the land gets wetter and greener. The savanna’s wetlands are its lush margin — a seasonal river with lakes and green banks — and this is giraffe country. The park’s Rothschild’s giraffes browse at eye level from the raised paths, strip the palm crowns, and conduct their slow, stately traffic across the meadows with cranes and storks picking the shallows beneath them and the city, now and then, visible over the treetops behind: a giraffe against an apartment block is the Bioparc’s most Valencian photograph, and somehow the park gets away with it. From the bridge and the higher banks you look down into the whole green system at once — water, meadows, and animals arranged by appetite rather than by species label.

And then, the baobabs. The elephant enclosure recreates a baobab forest, the giant bottle-trunked trees standing around a bathing lake, and beneath them lives one of the largest elephant herds in Spain: a breeding herd of African elephants, a dozen animals strong in good years, matriarchs and sisters and — the herd’s celebrities — calves born here in Valencia, guarded in the middle of the group like royalty in a procession. Elephants this close, in this much space, doing elephant things at elephant pace, is a hard sight to hurry: they bathe, they dust-bathe, they demolish branches, they negotiate. The Samburu restaurant’s terrace overlooks this side of the park, and a slow lunch watching the herd move between the baobabs and the lake is, minute for minute, one of the best-value experiences in Valencia.

What to See: The Equatorial Forest

From the open glare of the savanna the path drops into shade, and the park changes key. The equatorial forest is the Bioparc’s green heart — dense, dripping, deliberately jungle-like — and its headliners are the apes. The gorilla troop, a breeding group of western lowland gorillas, holds a forest clearing of grass, fallen trunks and climbing frames of dead trees, viewed at its closest through a great glass window where the animals come and sit, with great deliberation, on the other side of the pane from the children. The troop made headlines in 2012 with Ebo, the first gorilla ever born in the Valencian Community, and the family has been growing, arguing and reconciling in public ever since. Nearby, the chimpanzees run their own noisy politics on their island, and the forest’s supporting cast is the richest in the park: leopards in the trees, bongos in the deep shade, red river hogs rootling the leaf litter, drills and mangabeys in the branches.

Give the forest’s quieter corner its moment: the pygmy hippos, the gorillas’ small, shy, forest cousins of the great river hippos, wallowing in their own dark pool among the roots — an animal most zoos do not keep and almost nobody has heard of, which is exactly why the Bioparc keeps it. The equatorial forest is also where the park’s conservation brief is easiest to read: nearly everything here is in trouble in the wild, the breeding programmes are European and serious, and the panels — mercifully brief — tell you what is being done about it. Come through in the morning if you can, when the forest is at its most active and its most atmospheric, the light coming down through the leaves in shafts and the apes still in the middle of their day’s first business.

What to See: Kitum Cave — Hippos Underwater

The park’s strangest building is a cave you could walk past. The Cueva del Kitum recreates the famous salt caves of Mount Elgon, on the Kenya–Uganda border, where wild elephants file into the dark to mine the cave walls for salt — and under the Bioparc’s savanna, the recreation holds the park’s one great underwater room. Inside the dim, echoing grotto, windows look into green water where the park’s true giants move: Nile hippopotamuses, all two tonnes of them, walking the pool floor in slow motion, rising to breathe, sinking again past the glass like living submarines. Hippos on land are comedy; hippos underwater, at this range, are ballet — it is the single most quietly astonishing viewpoint in the park, and the one the aquarium at the other end of the river would be proud of.

The cave’s other tenants share the water and the banks: Nile crocodiles hauled out or suspended in the shallows with only their eyes and teeth in evidence, and shoals of African lake fish — cichlids in their hundreds — working the water the hippos stir. Take your time on the way through; the cave rewards the same slowness as the tunnel across the river in our Oceanogràfic guide, and it is the coolest, calmest room in the park on a hot Valencian afternoon, which is not a small recommendation in August.

What to See: Madagascar

The journey’s last habitat is an island, and it behaves like one. Madagascar is reached across the water — past the lake where the flamingos feed — and from the moment you arrive the rules change, because the lemurs are not behind anything. The park’s Madagascar recreates the island’s spiny, strange world, and its troops of lemurs — ring-tailed, red ruffed, black-and-white ruffed, crowned — roam the whole enclosure, trees, lawns and, regularly, the visitor path itself, while keepers wander with them keeping a benevolent eye on the diplomacy. The convention is absolute and simple: the lemurs have right of way, you do not touch and you do not feed — and in exchange a ring-tail will sit down a metre from your shoes, unfurl that banded banner of a tail, and sun itself with its arms out like a tiny meditating king, close enough to see the amber of its eyes.

Stay a while, because Madagascar repays loitering like nowhere else in the park. The lemur troops have a whole society to run — sunbathing circles in the morning, chases and wrestling matches in the trees, infants riding jockey-style on their mothers’ backs — and around them the island keeps its other endemics: Aldabra giant tortoises grazing the verges like slow boulders, and, in its own enclosure, the fossa, Madagascar’s top predator, a catlike, tree-climbing hunter that most visitors walk past without ever knowing it was the most unusual animal they saw all day. It is the perfect last habitat: the one continent-within-a-continent, left to the end, where the distance between you and the wildlife finally closes to nothing.

Practical Info

Tickets and timing. The Bioparc is open every day of the year, from 10:00 — closing runs from 18:00 in the depths of winter to 21:00 in high summer, with the long spring evenings at 20:00; check the day’s hours before you set out, and note that the last entry is an hour before closing. Gate prices at the time of writing run to around €31 for an adult and €24 for children aged 4–12, with under-fours free — booking ahead online is usually a few euros cheaper and, on weekends, school holidays and anywhere near Fallas, saves you the ticket queue entirely. An annual pass exists and pays for itself in about two visits; if you live in Valencia, it is the city’s worst-kept bargain.

How long. Three hours is the floor, four is honest, and families should plan five and still expect resistance at the exit. The route is one looping, step-free path, so you cannot get lost — but you can easily get absorbed, and the park’s keeper talks and the amphitheatre’s bird exhibition are worth building in rather than stumbling on.

Getting there and eating. The Bioparc sits at the western end of the Turia gardens at Avenida Pío Baroja 3. The nearest metro is Nou d’Octubre (lines 3, 5 and 9), a ten-minute walk across the park bridge; city buses 95, 98 and 99 stop near the entrance, the 95 running the length of the old riverbed; and the connoisseur’s approach is by bike or on foot down the Turia gardens themselves — a flat, green, eight-kilometre ride from the City of Arts end that turns the journey into half the day out. Drivers get a car park beside the entrance, a few euros for the day. Food inside beats the captive-audience average: the Samburu restaurant serves proper lunches on a terrace over the savanna — book the terrace edge if you can — with a café and kiosks for the rest, and the Cabecera park lawns outside for a picnic before or after.

Tips for Visiting

• Arrive at the 10:00 opening and go deep first. The animals are most active in the first two hours and the crowds are still at the gate: head straight for the forest and the elephants, and let the savanna keep for your way back.
• Do Madagascar when the sun is out. The lemurs sunbathe in the morning and early afternoon; on a bright day the island is the liveliest place in Valencia, and on a grey one merely wonderful.
• Pair it with the river, not against it. The Bioparc is one end of the Turia; the aquarium and the whole complex are at the other — our City of Arts and Sciences guide walks that end building by building, and a Turia day that starts with lemurs and ends with belugas is Valencia at its best.
• Give the old town its own day. Don’t try to bolt the Bioparc onto a Gothic-quarter afternoon; the cathedral quarter deserves its own morning — start with our Valencia Cathedral guide for the Grail and the Miguelete.
• Sit down in the Kitum cave. Everyone photographs the hippos and hurries on; the ones who stay ten minutes watch a two-tonne animal walk along the bottom like a moon landing. The park’s best seat is underwater.
• With children, keep the lemurs for a second wind. Madagascar sits at the far end of the route and works as the day’s grand finale — an island where the animals walk up to you is a hard act to follow, so don’t waste it at 10:15.

Final Thoughts

Every great zoo city has one park that changes what a zoo is allowed to be, and Valencia’s is this: ten hectares of Africa folded into the head of a riverbed park, where the fences have been thought away and what remains is landscape, patience and animals close enough to look back at you. Come for the elephants under their baobabs — everybody does — but stay for the whole slow journey of it: the rhino at the gallop, the hippo walking the green floor of its cave, the lion asleep against the glass, and a ring-tailed lemur sitting in the middle of your path at the end of the world, regarding you with perfect calm, as if you were the rarest thing in the park. Give it the half day it asks for — or the whole day it usually gets.

¡Buen viaje!

Photo credits: The giant elephant sculpture at the entrance — Deirdre, CC BY-SA 4.0 · A green habitat inside the park — Josu PV, CC BY-SA 4.0 · A white rhino at the gallop — Gabriel Villena, CC BY 2.0 · A zebra mare and her foal — Derek Rankine, CC BY 2.0 · A lion asleep in the grass — Alberto-g-rovi, CC BY-SA 3.0 · Giraffes feeding at the palms — Gabriel Villena, CC BY 2.0 · The elephant herd with its calf — Josu PV, CC BY-SA 4.0 · A young gorilla on the grass — Alberto-g-rovi, CC BY-SA 3.0 · A pygmy hippo in its pool — Derek Rankine, CC BY 2.0 · The Kitum cave lake — Gabriel Villena, CC BY 2.0 · A Nile crocodile up close — Derek Rankine, CC BY 2.0 · A ring-tailed lemur portrait — Gabriel Villena, CC BY 2.0 · Ring-tailed lemurs at rest — Gabriel Villena, CC BY 2.0. All via Wikimedia Commons.