Almaty Zoo in Kazakhstan: opening hours and how to visit

Almaty Zoo is a city zoo in Almaty’s Medeu District, at the foot of Kok-Tobe hill next to Gorky Central Park. It opened in 1937, and the city’s culture department calls it the oldest zoo in Kazakhstan. Today it keeps 385 species and more than 4,000 animals, birds and reptiles on 21 hectares (city akimat, January 2026). About 1.2 million people visited in 2025.

For a traveller, the reason to come is the local wildlife you are unlikely to meet in the wild: saigas from the steppe, Tian Shan brown bears and tigers, a species Kazakhstan is now bringing back.

Opening hours

Almaty Zoo is open daily from 9:00 to 18:00, with no weekly day off and no separate winter timetable on its website. The ticket desks close an hour earlier, at 17:00, so arriving late in the afternoon does not work.

If reptiles are the point of your visit, avoid Tuesday. You may still see 19:00 or 20:00 closing times in reviews from 2019 and 2023; the zoo’s own page now says 18:00.

Tickets and payment

Entry is paid. We do not quote prices because they change: the current list is on the zoo’s website (in Russian and Kazakh, with an English version). Prices nearly doubled on 15 January 2026. They are pegged to Kazakhstan’s monthly calculation index, so the amounts are not round numbers.

• Adult ticket, from age 12: the grounds plus the primate and predator house.
• Child ticket, from age 7: adds the contact area and playgrounds.

How to pay. The “Tickets” link on the zoo’s website leads to Kaspi, a Kazakh payment service that most visitors without a local bank account cannot use. At the gate, 2GIS lists card, cash and QR payment.

Free entry applies, with documents, to pensioners by age, people with disabilities, WWII veterans, conscript soldiers and young children. The lists differ between the zoo’s own pages, and it is unclear whether these rules cover foreign pensioners.

How to get there without a car

The address is 166 Esenberlin Street, Medeu District. Show it to a taxi driver or type it into 2GIS, the map app locals use; the zoo’s website itself offers only “Open in 2GIS” and “Open in Google Maps” buttons.

1. Bus. The nearest stop in 2GIS is “Esenberlin”, about 500 m and 6 minutes on foot from the entrance. Bus 60 (Zhibek Zholy Avenue to Sayazhai) stops there. Other route numbers appear in directories, but we could not verify them.
2. Metro. We could not confirm which metro station is closest or how far it is. Plan the last stretch from the metro in 2GIS.
3. Taxi. The simplest option if you do not read Cyrillic. Parking near the zoo is limited: the city calls it insufficient, plans to expand it and acknowledges complaints about traffic and a difficult approach (Informburo, November 2025).

Holidays are busy. Over the Nauryz spring holidays in March 2026 the zoo had about 40,000 visitors.

Snow leopard, saiga and tigers: Kazakhstan’s wildlife at the zoo

The city says the collection includes 24 species from Kazakhstan’s Red Book, but the zoo does not publish the list. The table shows only Kazakh species whose presence at the zoo is confirmed by a dated report. Protected status is checked against Kazakhstan’s legal list of rare species, Government Decree No. 1034 as amended on 17 August 2026.

In practice, tigers, bears and saigas are the Kazakh species you can count on seeing. The snow leopard is the one people search for, and the honest answer is that we found no report of it at the zoo after 2023.

The saiga is not a Red Book species. The zoo and local media call it rare, and saigas breed here regularly: in 2026 the females Stella and Aina had two calves (Caravan). But the saiga is absent from the current Decree No. 1034 list, so “Red Book saiga” is wrong. Our saiga page explains the 2026 count and its legal status.

We found no 2024–2026 confirmation of kulan, Przewalski’s horse, goitered gazelle, Pallas’s cat or argali at the zoo. Note also that the “red flamingo” on the zoo’s website is a different species from the greater flamingo on Kazakhstan’s rare species list.

What else to see

Most animals live in outdoor enclosures, with four indoor houses and seven zones in total.

• Primate and predator house (adult ticket). A white-handed gibbon and two pairs of ring-tailed lemur twins were born here in March 2026 (BES.media).
• Exotarium, the reptile house. Fidel the Cuban crocodile turned 40 in August 2026.
• Bird house, closed on Thursdays.
• Contact area for children, part of the child ticket.
• Summer enclosures with elephants, giraffes, rhinos, zebras, tapirs and pelicans (BES.media, March 2026).

The zoo’s home page features a white rhino, lion, jaguar, emu, red-crowned crane, lowland tapir and white-handed gibbon. A bison, tamandua, civet, genet and agama arrived in 2025 (Kazinform), and three kangaroo joeys were born in spring 2026. There was an aquarium section in 2020, but it no longer appears on the zoo’s website.

Rules and a quick plan

• Do not feed the animals: the zoo’s rules forbid it, as each animal has a set diet.
• No pets, bicycles, scooters, skateboards or roller skates. Prams and children’s ride-ons are allowed.
• Bring ID for any free-entry category.
• Arrive before 17:00 and allow at least 1.5 to 2 hours.

The zoo’s website does not say whether there are ramps, wheelchair-accessible toilets or pram rental. If you need them, ask in advance; the phone numbers in the site header and footer differ.

With children, the zoo pairs well with the Main Botanical Garden. More ideas for a family day are in Almaty with kids, and the rest of the city is covered in our Almaty guide.

History, rebuild and EAZA status

The zoo was founded by a decree of 13 January 1937 and opened that year with 70 species, saigas among them. In 1961 Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru gave it two elephants, Dubas and Palma, who had five calves.

A large rebuild is planned. In February 2025 officials said the zoo would be redesigned by geographic region in stages until 2028 and would stay on its current site. In November 2025 the city began buying neighbouring plots and said the design would be finished in 2026; after the rebuild the zoo should handle up to 2 million visitors a year. We found no reports of works starting or of areas closing as of November 2026.

EAZA. The zoo’s website says it has been a member of the European Association of Zoos and Aquaria since 2025, and the city calls it a full member. EAZA’s own magazine, Zooquaria No. 128 (Winter 2025), is more precise: in September 2025 the EAZA Council moved Almaty Zoo from candidate to temporary membership. The zoo also lists EARAZA membership since 1994 and WAZA since 2003, which we did not check on those associations’ sites.