Fota Wildlife Park

I first visited Fota wildlife park in Cork when I was 5, and continued to visit every 1-2 years since. Perhaps the largest zoo in Ireland at 100 acres, the park has very spacious enclosures for its animals compared to Dublin or Belfast, with the standout example being the Savannah paddock with giraffes, zebras, ostriches and scimitar-horned oryx. Some of the animals roam freely throughout the park, including eastern grey kangaroos, Bennett’s wallabies, peafowl and guineafowl.

Aside from the aforementioned giraffes and their neighbours, the signature species for the park is arguably the cheetah. Since 1985, well over 200 cheetah cubs have been born and successfully raised at the park, which also coordinates the European breeding programme for the northern cheetah subspecies. As part of its enrichment programme, the park has a special ‘cheetah run’ where the cats have to chase after meat suspended in the air on a wire; this was installed in 2006, around the same time I first visited. The park has also successfully bred European bison over the years, and in 2022, two Fota-bred bison were reintroduced into the Blean woods in Kent, becoming some of the first bison to roam freely in Britain since prehistoric times. Other popular species at the park include red pandas, lemurs, gibbons, pelicans, and Humboldt penguins.

Like with Dublin and Belfast, I attended the park’s summer camp when I was 12 (a month before I attended Belfast Zoo’s camp). While there, I was lucky to get to ride on the Fota train, and I also learned about the new Asian Sanctuary that the park was developing at the time. As of 2024, the sanctuary is home Sumatran tigers, Asian lions, Visayan warty pigs and spotted deer, and Indian Rhinos, along with the red pandas, lion-tailed macaques and gibbons already living in the park. The Asian sanctuary had also planned to bring in some interesting species like the takin and an Asian bear species (which I initially heard was sloth bear), but these plans sadly never happened. In the years since I attended the summer camp, the park has developed new South America and Madagascar exhibits, and become home to drill monkeys, the less colourful but more endangered cousin of the mandrill, which I had seen before at Edinburgh Zoo.

I remember when first visiting the park as a child, I hopped along with the free-ranging kangaroos in a rather muddy, wet area of the park, and I won’t forget the guanaco that was sitting on the side of the visitor’s path (this species no longer lives at the park). On my 2017 visit to the park, my family and I saw four adorable cheetah cubs (probably the first time I’ve ever seen baby cheetahs) and we also heard the Brazilian tapirs making strange, high-pitched squeaks, sounds we wouldn’t have expected to hear a tapir make. And in 2022, I took the train down to Cork for the first time ever, and got off at Fota’s own train station so I learned how to get to the park using public transport.

Link to their website.