The World's Best Zoo

Omaha's Henry Doorly Zoo did not begin as a destination. It began in eighteen ninety-four as the Riverview Park Zoo, a modest collection of animals in a municipal park near the Missouri River bluffs. By nineteen fifty-two, a local zoological society had formed to organize its long-term development. In nineteen sixty-three, Margaret Hitchcock Doorly donated seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars to the institution with one condition: it would be renamed in memory of her late husband, Henry Doorly, who had run the Omaha World-Herald.

What grew from there became, by almost any measure, one of the most significant zoological institutions on the planet. In twenty fourteen, TripAdvisor rated it the best zoo in the world, ahead of the San Diego Zoo and dozens of other major institutions. Subsequent rankings have placed it consistently at or near the top of global lists.

The claim rests partly on scale and partly on innovation. The zoo operates the world's largest nocturnal exhibit, an indoor habitat where conditions are reversed so that animals active at night can be observed during daytime visiting hours. It contains one of the world's largest indoor rainforests, under a climate-controlled glass structure the size of a city block. Its Desert Dome is among the world's largest indoor deserts, enclosed beneath a geodesic dome that is one of the largest glazed structures of its kind.

The zoo has also become a major center for wildlife conservation and research, working with endangered species programs worldwide. That it sits in the middle of the Great Plains, hundreds of miles from any coast or major mountain range, is part of what makes it remarkable. Omaha built a world-class institution where you would not necessarily expect one.