Zoo Dvůr Králové nad Labem
Zoo Dvůr Králové nad Labem - Africa within reach
Zoo Dvůr Králové nad Labem - Africa within reach
The Dvůr Králové Garden was founded in 1946. Almost 20 years later, Josef Vágner took the lead. A forester, naturalist, traveler, teacher, father, and the most significant director of the zoo.
From his legendary expeditions to Africa, he managed to bring around three thousand animals, which laid the foundation for very valuable breeding programs not only in Dvůr Králové. Thanks to him, we are now able to fulfill our main mission and return endangered species back to nature.
In order to distinguish the zoo from other Czech and European zoos, he promoted a specialization in Africa and focused on ensuring that the animals in human care thrived as much as possible – increasing enclosures, replacing cages with moats, and constructing modern pavilions. However, his biggest dream was to build a safari similar to those he had seen during his visits to Africa. At the same time, he realized that animals in the African wilderness were increasingly endangered, and he believed that one way to help them was to bring representatives of selected species into human care and, once the situation allowed, return their offspring to nature.
Between 1967 and 1975, he organized a total of nine major expeditions to Africa and Asia, from which he directly obtained nearly two thousand animals for the Dvůr Králové zoo. Vágner's transports stood out from others due to their high success rate in terms of the number of animals that survived. He selected strong individuals, confident that they could handle the long journey of thousands of kilometers and acclimatize to a completely new environment.
His dream became a reality in 1989 when the Dvůr Králové safari first opened to visitors. Twenty-five years later, in his honor, it was renamed the Josef Vágner African Safari, and in 2016, it was declared a cultural monument.