Leningrad Zoo: 800-rouble tickets, polar bears and the elephants that never came

Families arrive at Gorkovskaya metro station, buy two adult tickets and one child ticket, walk through the gate — and forty minutes later realise they have already seen almost everything. Someone asks where the elephants are. There are none, and there will be none until a new zoo is built. Whether Leningrad Zoo is worth your afternoon depends entirely on what you expect from it.

A private menagerie from 1865

The zoo opened on 1 August 1865 as a private menagerie run by a Dutchman, Julius Gebhardt, and became state property only in 1917. It calls itself one of the oldest in Russia — Moscow's opened a year earlier — and still follows its nineteenth-century layout. That is the core problem: the site sits in Alexandrovsky Park beside the Peter and Paul Fortress, with nowhere to expand.

Prices and opening hours

An adult ticket (18 and over) costs 800 roubles; children aged 7 to 17 and students pay 400; pensioners and veterans pay 300; children under 7 enter free. Proof of a concession must be shown twice, at the ticket office and again at the entrance gate, and visitors aged 14 and over need a passport or student card.

Since 1 September 2026 the zoo has been open from 10:00 to 20:00, but the ticket offices and the entrance close an hour earlier, at 19:00. The schedule is revised several times a season, and in winter it moves earlier. Individual attractions close before the zoo does: the giraffe pavilion at 19:00, the goat petting area at 17:45, and that one does not run in bad weather at all.

What you will and will not see

The collection lists more than 500 species, but most are birds, fish, reptiles and invertebrates in the Exotarium. The headline animals are the polar bears, the zoo's symbol, in an enclosure complex built in 2018, plus an Amur tiger, an African lion, a jaguar, a lynx and a reticulated giraffe. There are no great apes, and no elephants, hippos, pandas or zebras — the zoo has no elephant house, which is why two elephant calves given to the city by the leader of Laos in 2025 never arrived.

Winter, and the relocation question

Winter is not a dead season here. The Tropical House opens only during the cold months, and the display about the zoo during the Siege of Leningrad occupies the old brown bear house, the oldest surviving building on site. The zoo closed to the public only once in its history, in the winter of 1941–42, reopening that spring.

In June 2026 the city signed a letter of intent with a developer to build a new 85-hectare zoo near the Yuntolovo nature reserve. Officials have stated that this is not a relocation: the existing zoo is not closing, and the new site is under discussion as a second location with no fixed timetable.