The Historic Grounds of Zoo Antwerpen

Belgium's oldest zoo has spent more of its history rebuilding than expanding. Zoo Antwerpen opened on 21 July 1843, right beside what would become the city's Centraal Station, and its site and tree cover were repeatedly caught in the crossfire of a location that made strategic sense for a railway hub and none at all for a garden: German bombardment damaged the zoo badly in August 1914, and the Second World War hit it even harder, destroying the aquarium, reptile house, bird house, hippo house and winter garden in a single conflict. That the zoo's landscaped grounds, laid out and steadily replanted under head gardener Florent Blockx from around 1935 onward, survived both wars intact enough to be protected as a landscape in 1975 and recognised as a full historical monument in 1984, says as much about the tree cover's resilience as about the animals it shelters. A dedicated irrigation system installed in 1982 keeps the older plantings alive through Belgian summers. No single tree here is singled out in the historical record, so this entry stands for the grounds as a whole, a rare case of a European zoo's landscaping surviving through two world wars fought in the same city block.