San Diego Zoo tickets and admission

San Diego’s is one of the world’s most famous zoos: home to 2,600 species including rare and endangered animals. It’s also right in the city, and so easy to visit. A little further out of town is the zoo’s safari park, where you can see African and Asian creatures roaming ‘in the wild’.

One of the most famous animals was Ken Allen, an orangutan who managed to escape his escape-proof cage three times in 1985. Once out, he would stroll around the zoo like a visitor. Mountaineers were eventually employed to find, and remove, all possible hand- and toe-holds that could assist Ken. Known locally as ‘the Hairy Houdini”, he lived to the old age of 29 before getting cancer.

San Diego Zoo is also home to an amazing project called the Frozen Zoo: a collection of sub-zero cell cultures, oocytes, sperm, and embryos representing 1000 animal types. Naturally, you can’t visit these specimens (which are rather small and icy), but they represent the future of some species and guarantee zoological sustainability. At least one resource, the po’ouli, is currently extinct in nature.