Haifa Educational Zoo (official site – only in Hebrew) is located on the slopes of Mount Carmel. The zoo is quite big and you can find there all standard animals, like lions, tigers, monkeys… But, since the zoo is on the slope of Carmel mountain, there are no big animals like elephants, giraffes, and hippos.
Map of the area:
Background Information
Haifa Educational Zoo was created in 1948. It was originally located in the basement of a synagogue. This basement also held lessons for pupils and advanced study for teachers and that’s why it’s called Educational Zoo.
Haifa Educational Zoo is located on the slopes of Mount Carmel and it’s a medium size zoo. You can spend there from several hours up to a half day.
Map of Haifa Educational Zoo:
From time to time there are coupons or 1+1 deals for credit card holders and you can purchase the tickets at half price. That is what I did several times. I bought tickets as low as 19 NIS per person.
In this post, I will tell you about several visits that took place over recent years to this zoo.
First Visit At Haifa Educational Zoo
As a photographer, I prefer when animals are not behind bars, rather when you enter big areas where animals are free and you can freely walk among them. This is the case regarding birds:
The same (no bars and no glass) is true for some of the monkeys:
On the official site, you can find an interactive map with locations and photos of the animals, this can be handy if you’re not going to visit all animals. From this map, you can also see that there are 41 locations to visit. Meaning at least 41 species are represented.
Owls at sleep:
The zoo is open during weekdays, half day on Friday and full/half day on Saturday (depending on the season). You can find updated opening hours on the official site.
Here are couple additional photos:
There are also a couple of white Bengal tigers. I guess, the zookeepers are proud of having them since the Tigers appeared on the cover of their booklet.
The photo above was made through a thick glass with a lot of scratches on it. It took me more than an hour in post-production to clear these scratches a bit.
Since in Israel it is quite hot, I would suggest visiting animals early in the morning (when they are more active).
Second Visit At Haifa Educational Zoo
As I mentioned in my other post, one of the things I liked in Haifa Educational Zoo is the fact that in many cases you enter into pavilions. This way you are closer to the animals and you don’t have to shoot through the glass/bars.
Inside birds pavilion:
On guard:
My neck hurts just from watching this suricate 🙂
Then we continued to the big cats’ section. And we start with a couple of white Bengal tigers:
They were probably already fed, thus weren’t moving much.
Leopard:
Caracal:
Lion:
And the bear was waiting for food:
There were three bears. Looked like the mother with two kids and the kids were fighting among themselves until the mother came and slapped both of them. Then each kid went to another corner:
Reptile corner:
Green on green:
Lizard:
Prehistoric Museum
In my previous visit I missed the Prehistoric Museum (#34 on the map), but this time we visited it:
Prehistoric Museum isn’t big. It has two floors. The lower one is occupied mostly with models representing different times of human development:
Another model:
And the upper shows different archaeological findings. Many of the findings are from caves at Mount Carmel.
One downside that I learned the hard way is regarding opening times. They write that Haifa Educational Zoo opens at 9 am on Saturdays. We arrived at 9:30 at it was open, but not fully open. What do I mean by fully open? As I mentioned previously there are many pavilions, and one of them is Lemur pavilion:
When we passed around it at 10 am it was still closed. Only on our way back (around noon) it was open. But, even at noon, some pavilions were still closed. For example, I wanted to visit prey birds, but their pavilion was still closed.
And lastly, we said bye to the turtle and went home.
Pandas?
One more thing worth mentioning is pandas. About a year ago the media reported that China ‘agrees to gift pandas‘ to Haifa zoo. When I visited Haifa Educational Zoo there were no pandas and I haven’t seen any new accommodation for them 🙁
Summary
If I sum up, despite the incident with the closed pavilions, Haifa Educational Zoo a nice one. One certain plus of this zoo is that many of the animals are neither behind glass nor bars. And if you find coupons and buy tickets for around 20 NIS (per person) then it definitely worth a visit.
Have you ever been to Haifa Educational Zoo? Tell us about your visit in the comments below.
That’s all for today and I’ll see you in future travels!
Stay Tuned!
For additional attractions nearby see Haifa.
