Parque Zoologico Nacional de Cuba

The Parque Zoologico Nacional de Cuba is the country's national zoo, on more than 300 hectares of former quarry land beside the village of Calabazar in the Boyeros district of Havana. It was conceived in the 1960s once it became clear that the older Havana zoo had run out of room, built from 1971 with heavy involvement from local people and mass organisations, and opened to the public in March 1984.

It was laid out to the standards of its day for keeping animals in apparent freedom: open grassland paddocks, moated enclosures and large pens rather than cages, with visitors carried along the internal roads by bus and looking down from raised viewpoints. It holds native Cuban fauna alongside species from other continents, runs breeding programmes for protected and endangered animals, and took over the large herbivores - giraffes, elephants - that the older city zoo could no longer house.