Bioparco di Roma

Bioparco di Roma tickets: an open date, or the ticket office on the day

The Bioparco ticket we sell has no date on it. It costs €26 for an adult and €19 for a child or a senior, and it’s good for any day in the six months after you buy it. You show it on your phone at the entrance, and there’s no time slot to book.

That open date is what our ticket’s higher price buys. The park’s own ticket office sells tickets for the day you’re there, at a fixed price lower than ours, and the park’s website sells dated tickets at prices that change from day to day. With ours you have entry sorted before you know which morning of your trip is free. It can’t be refunded, though, so buy it once you’re sure you’ll go.

The listing for our ticket also includes the park’s activities: the feedings of the monkeys, lemurs, chimpanzees and seals on Saturdays, Sundays and holidays, meetings with keepers and their amphibians, reptiles and small mammals on Sundays, and Sofia the Asian elephant’s lunch on Sundays at 12:00. You book them at the desk at the entrance on the day, and apart from Sofia’s lunch the times vary.

A few tickets are only sold at the gate, and the height of your children matters more than their age.

Rome zoo hours this winter, and when the big cats go in

The Bioparco opens every day of the year at 9:30, and closes only on 25 December. Since late October it’s on winter hours, shutting at 17:00, and the ticket office and the last entry are an hour before closing, at 16:00.

The gates close at 17:00, but several animals go in before that, and in winter it’s the difference between seeing the big cats and missing them.

The reptile house closes at 16:00, and from November to March so do the big cats. The chimpanzees go in at 16:15, and the giraffes, bears, rhinos and elephants at 16:30.

So in winter we’d be inside by 15:00 at the latest, and earlier in the day if the tigers and leopards are what you came for. The same clock makes the €9 Last Minute ticket less of a bargain from November to March: it’s sold from 15:00, and by the time you’re through the gate the reptile house and the cats have an hour left at most.

Wind or a weather alert can close the park early, or keep it shut. When that happens, the park can refund the tickets it sold itself, or move them to another date, if the management agrees.

Roma Pass at the Bioparco: €4 off, and entry included on the Turbopass

Two of Rome’s city passes work here, in different ways. The Turbopass City Pass includes entry to the Bioparco, while the Turbopass Essentials doesn’t. The Roma Pass doesn’t include it: it takes €4 off the entry for the cardholder alone, at the park’s ticket office, and that discount can’t be added to any other.

With the Roma Pass you buy a dated ticket at the gate and show the card. Children and over-65s already pay a reduced price at the ticket office that’s lower than an adult ticket with the discount, so the card’s saving is really for the adults in your group. Its real use here is getting you to the gate, since tram 19 and the buses that stop at the zoo are included on it.

The Omnia Card, the Rome Tourist Card and the Vatican City Pass don’t list the Bioparco. The Turbopass page has everything the City Pass covers, and Roma Pass and Rome’s other city passes sets the passes side by side.

Pushchairs, scooters and dogs at the Bioparco’s gate

The rules that catch families out are the ones at the entrance, so it helps to know them before you pack.

Inside, the rules are the ones you’d expect: no feeding the animals, no climbing the fences and no shouting.

The animals at the Bioparco di Roma, from rhinos to the aviary

More than a thousand animals live across the Bioparco’s 17 hectares, inside Villa Borghese. The big ones are what draw families: hippos, giraffes, tigers, leopards, bears, and the white rhinos, who graze in front of a thatched shelter among the trees.

Sofia, the Asian elephant, is the one to plan a Sunday around, since her lunch at noon is one of the activities on our ticket. The snakes are in the reptile house, the first area to close on a winter afternoon, so head there early.

Birds fill the large aviary, a steel geodesic dome you spot over the shrubs before you reach it.

The Bioparco di Roma’s history: a 1911 zoo without cages

The moats you look across today go back to the start. The zoo opened on 5 January 1911, laid out by Carl Hagenbeck, who replaced cages with open enclosures separated from visitors by moats, and that idea still shapes the rhinos’ and the bears’ spaces.

In 1935 Raffaele De Vico enlarged it to the 17 hectares it covers now, adding the reptile house and the geodesic aviary. After the Second World War the zoo went into decline, and the park you visit today took shape from the 1990s: the idea of a Bioparco was born in 1994, the project followed in 1998, and in 2004 a foundation took over, with conservation, education and research as its job. Today it’s a member of EAZA, the European association of zoos and aquariums, and of WAZA, its world counterpart.

Getting to the Bioparco di Roma: a walk through Villa Borghese, or tram 19 to the gate

From the centre, the nicest way in is on foot through Villa Borghese, the park the zoo sits in. Take metro line A, the red line, to Flaminio or Spagna, and walk up into the gardens from there.

Tram 19 is the one that stops at the gate, at a stop simply called Bioparco. Buses 3, 52, 53, 217, 360 and 926 stop nearby, and the 910 stops at the entrance on Saturdays, Sundays and holidays only. The Roma Pass covers all of them. Coming by car, leave the ring road (the GRA) at the Salaria centro – Parioli exit.