I expected this post to be longer. Fuengirola Bioparc was a highlight of my trip to Spain, and I kind of assumed I’d be able to make a pretty long post of it. And I could do, but it would be almost entirely listing animals. Which it is, but I realised that’s not the most interesting thing to read, so have reigned it in a bit. I’ve kept the animal rambling to the ones which came most readily to my mind.
So. The best description I’ve found of Fuengirola Bioparc is an ‘immersion zoo’, where the whole park is made to look like the animals’ habitat, rather than just the individual enclosures. It’s based off Asian and African habitats. Many of the barriers are made using water, trees, and height differences, instead of bricks, glass and metal. They do use those as well, but where they can make it more natural looking, they have. I’ve been to this sort of place before, but not on the same level as this one. The number I’ve found is 130 different species and over 1400 individual animals.
And now shall begin the babbling. I’ve attempted to put some sort of order to it.
I’ve fond of cats, so I’ll mentioned those first. They had leopards and tigers, and another type of wild cat, though those must have been having a nap or something somewhere. But I got really good views of the leopards and tigers, because in both cases one of the pair had decided to sit right in front of the glass. In the case of the leopards, the other one really didn’t like this. It made some effort to move other one, which stubbornly remained in place, then took to pacing back and forth the length of the crowd. There were no such disagreements between the tigers – at least not while I was watching.
And there were different types of apes and monkeys. Two of the chimps were just hugging for ages, which was cute. But what was even cuter was the baby orangutan. The orangutans had a big metal structure to climb on, and the mother and baby were sat just tucked out of view, but sometimes the baby would come a bit away from its mother and into sight, before returning to her.
Other mammals.
They had pygmy hippos. I’ve been to a lot of animal parks, and I don’t recall ever seeing any kind of hippo before, so that was a bit special. And meerkats, which I’ve seen in multiple places, but they’re always a treat. There’s just something so inherently amusing about them.
I don’t remember the name of the animal I found the cutest. Google searches for ‘tiny black deer thing’ have not proved fruitful. But it really was one of the most adorable animals I have seen in my life.
There was one of those indoor areas you can walk through and see animals roaming about in. This one was mostly birds, but there were also bats in here. I failed to spot them the first time I walked through because I didn’t look up. During July and August the Bioparc stays open until midnight – they say they’re the only one in Europe to do so – so you will be able to see the nocturnal animals up and about. But I was there in the day, so the bats were sleeping.
As for the birds, I don’t remember any names, but they were all very pretty. There were more pretty birds in enclosures throughout the park, as well as a few odd-looking ducks. I am aware that ducks are birds, but in my head they are for some reason distinguished from others. I guess because they’re never really enclosed anywhere in these places. They usually are in enclosures, as these ones were, but they could leave if they wanted to. So they just want to.
The biggest birds were a pair of what I’m 99.9% certain were Southern Cassowaries. These are flightless birds, second only to ostriches in size, and this pair had eggs. Apparently, it was the male that was sat on them. And crocodiles. I think I’ve seen there before, but I’ve never been anywhere you could see them so close. One of them was lying right next to the glass, and all I can say is the obvious: they are massive.
Throughout the park there were many different types of fish, just in the water of various enclosures, and eventually I found the spot where you could see them underwater. It felt a bit weird that there weren’t more areas like this, but I suppose designing enclosures must be enough of a job already without adding fish viewpoints into the mix. I’m glad they decided it was worth doing one bit though.
And that’s just a selection of the animals there. It was a brilliant day in a great place, and I hope I’ve managed to get that across at least a little bit. Thanks for visiting my blog.