Parque Zoologico de Santiago de Cuba

The Parque Zoologico de Santiago de Cuba is a conservation and environmental education centre holding native and foreign species as a biological and genetic reserve. It was founded in 1946 on the initiative of the then mayor Luis Casero, first sited in what was Roosevelt Park and is now Parque Manduley. Its first animals were donations - a puma from an oil company, a lion cub from Venezuela, a black bear called Llaqui, parakeets, hawks and a spider monkey - and most of the cages were wooden.

Around 1957 it moved to its present site on Avenida Raul Pujol in the Vista Alegre district, three caballerias of ground the city could not build on because of its dips and two streams, which were later channelled and became the zoo's lake. From 1959 the enclosures were rebuilt and the collection expanded.