ZOO

The people of Yerevan are very attached to their zoo and have been visiting it with increasing enthusiasm since it reopened in June 2015 after two years of hard work. The wait was well-deserved: the zoo doubled in size from 7 to 16 hectares and was refurbished in accordance with international standards. The zoo and its residents went through some difficult times during the 1992-1993 crisis. The animals have not always had enough to eat, but the hard part is over. An elephant, provided by Moscow, can even live a life as a couple with a companion from India, and he is unlikely to know the fate of the pachyderm that was the local news in the 1970s, for having escaped from its enclosure and run into the inhabitants before being shot down by a tank! An "anekdot" that left its mark on the inhabitants of the capital... After emergency treatment, the zoo underwent a complete facelift in 2008, but it is only now that it has regained the lustre of the zoological garden founded nearly 70 years ago and which prided itself on being one of the best in the USSR. Some 2,500 residents, representing 180 species, live in the zoo, which also aims to be a preservation centre for endangered species, not only local ones, such as the Przhevalski horse or the endemic Armenian mouflons, which could be reintroduced into their original environment with the panther, of which there are rare specimens in the forests of the south of the country.