Out of 126 zoos on the list of European zoos, the Budapest Zoo and Botanical Garden ranks 15th with 207 points. It is ahead of the domestic zoos (four of which are on the list) and several well-known affiliates such as the Copenhagen Zoo, the Berlin Zoo, the Artis Zoo in Amsterdam, the Hagenbeck Zoo in Hamburg, the London Zoo, the Antwerp Zoo, both the Barcelona Zoo, the Loro Parque in Tenerife and both zoos in Paris.

The list ranks Europe's leading zoos based on, among other things, an evaluation of the visitor experience, services and professional work in the garden.

The Elephant House is one of the most spectacular buildings in the zoo (Photo: zoobudapest.com)

The intellectual father of the rating system is British businessman Anthony Sheridan, who retired from the business in 2007 and then decided to visit Europe’s most important zoos on a regular basis and also developed a set of criteria for their evaluation. His list, along with a detailed description of the methodology and a summary of his other zoo experiences, was first published in 2011 in his book What Zoos Can Do. Since then, the list has been regularly updated.
  

  Hippos in the interior (Photo: zoobudapest.com)

In the latest edition of the rankings, in 2018, the capital zoo was ranked 17th out of 110 zoos, so the city park institution has improved its ranking in recent years, increasing the number of all zoos included in the evaluation.

The latest rankings, Zooscape 2020, were published as part of Sheridan’s Handbook of Zoos in Europe 2015-2030, published late last year.

Source: MTI

Cover photo: The Budapest Zoo and Botanical Garden ranks 15th in the European rankings (Photo: zoobudapest.c om)