LA PALMYRE ZOO

Every year, La Palmyre Zoo welcomes over 600,000 visitors. This success story began with Claude Caillé, a man with a passion for animals, who set up his park at La Palmyre, on a magnificent site in the heart of a maritime pine forest. At Easter 1966, the zoo opened its doors for the first time, presenting 60 animals over 3 hectares. From then on, the Caillé family adopted a lifestyle entirely devoted to animals. Year after year, the zoo grew and grew... Today, after 55 years, the park has 55 permanent employees, including some 40 animal caretakers and two veterinarians.

Asian elephants, orangutans, gorillas, lemurs, marmosets, giant otters, giraffes, hippos, rhinoceroses, zebras, Chilean flamingos, ibises, hornbills - in all, the zoo boasts almost 110 species. It plays an active role in safeguarding endangered species by taking part in over 60 European Ex-situ Breeding Programs (EEP), and by supporting a number of local players working at the heart of fragile natural ecosystems. The zoo's endowment fund, Palmyra Conservation, establishes long-term partnerships with programs seeking to protect animals whose survival is directly threatened by habitat destruction, poaching, trafficking for illegal trade, pollution or the expansion of human activities. Collaboration can take the form of an annual grant, technical or logistical support, funding for the purchase of equipment, or the creation of media to raise awareness among local populations of the need to preserve their biodiversity and environment. Palmyre Conservation, the Palmyre Zoo's endowment fund, currently finances some twenty organizations around the world. These include the Hutan program in Borneo, which preserves orangutans and elephants; the J.A.C.K association in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which rescues and rehabilitates trafficked chimpanzees; the Helpsimus association in Madagascar, which preserves the great hapalemur (one of the rarest lemurs in the world!); and Proyecto Titi, which protects the pinched tamarin, a small Colombian primate classified as critically endangered. Faced with today's environmental challenges and the accelerating erosion of biodiversity, the Palmyre Conservation endowment fund is strengthening and extending its action to safeguard endangered fauna and ecosystems in France and around the world.