The dolphin lagoon
Open-air pools and daily presentations โ the zoo's best-known corner.
Creando โ CC BY-SA 3.0 ยท Bernd Cogel โ CC BY-SA 4.0 ยท Henes71 โ CC BY-SA 4.0 ยท SimonWaldherr โ CC BY-SA 4.0
About twenty minutes on tram 5 from the main station, right to the gate. By car it is ten minutes, with large car parks that fill on sunny summer weekends.
Less than most: its strength is the forest and open ground, and indoor sections are relatively few. In rain, take the city's museums instead and save the zoo for a decent day.
Munich's Hellabrunn is more famous and easier to reach, but Nuremberg is wilder and more natural with its quarries and forest, and it has the dolphins Munich lacks. For families staying in Nuremberg or Bamberg it is the obvious choice.
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Nuremberg's Tiergarten is one of Europe's largest landscape zoos, laid out in 1939 in a forest of old sandstone quarries east of the city. The red rock and woodland are not scenery โ they are the site's own ground, and the enclosures are built into it rather than on top of it. The result is a zoo you walk like a forest outing that keeps producing animals: lions on quarry rock, snow leopards among crags, ibex on real slopes. Its best-known sections are the open-air dolphin lagoon and the aquatic house. It is big, and its paths climb and dip, so allow at least half a day โ with children, a whole one. There is a little train, plenty of playgrounds, and places to eat.
Open-air pools and daily presentations โ the zoo's best-known corner.
Natural red rock walls turned into homes for lions and ibex.
Shaded paths under tall trees โ a proper woodland walk before it is a zoo.
Sea lions and penguins seen through underwater windows.
Am Tiergarten 30, 90480 Nuremberg