The polar-bear tunnel
Swimming over your head in the Arctic Ring.
Guillaume Baviere from Helsingborg, Sweden — CC BY 2.0 · Ray Swi-hymn from Sijhih-Taipei, Taiwan — CC BY-SA 2.0 · Christian Ursilva from København, Danmark — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Christian Ursilva from København, Danmark — CC BY-SA 4.0
Because the two gardens were one royal park: Frederiksberg's summer palace on the hill and its canal winding round what later became the zoo — so when the new Elephant House was designed (2008) it was deliberately opened onto the canal for the public park to see free: a typically Danish decision that a view belongs to everyone.
Sign in to write your review of this place.
No reviews yet — be the first.
Copenhagen Zoo (1859) is among Europe's oldest and most architecturally designed: Norman Foster's Elephant House with its twin glass domes, the Arctic Ring with polar bears swimming over a glass tunnel, and the round Panda House (2019, Bjarke Ingels) for the Chinese pair — seven kilometres of paths for four thousand animals. Its wooden tower (1905) is the world's tallest wooden observation tower, opening in summer for the city panorama — and the zoo sits between the romantic Frederiksberg Gardens with their canal and palace (summer rowing boats pass right beside the elephant enclosure from the neighbouring garden, free) and Søndermarken with its museum cisterns underground: a complete green half-day west of the city. The family rule: elephants, pandas and bears first, in the morning before their naps — and bus 6A from the centre reaches it in a quarter-hour.
Swimming over your head in the Arctic Ring.
Passing beside the elephants from the neighbouring garden.
Roskildevej 32, 2000 Frederiksberg