Manila Zoo

Also known as: Manila Zoological and Botanical Garden

Definition

The Manila Zoo, officially the Manila Zoological and Botanical Garden, is the 5.5-hectare (14-acre) zoological park on Adriatico Street in Malate, Manila — the district this wiki’s Malate, Manila entry documents as the city’s bayfront — that first opened to the public on July 25, 1959 under Mayor Arsenio Lacson after about a year of construction costing over ₱1 million. It is owned by the City Government of Manila and managed by its Public Recreation Bureau, and has served as the country’s flagship public zoo for over six decades, holding 549 animals across roughly 90 species as of 2023 and more than 10,000 plants in its botanical garden. (Wikipedia — Manila Zoological and Botanical Garden)

The institution’s modern history is a closure-and-rehabilitation arc: it was indefinitely closed on January 23, 2019 after the Department of Environment and Natural Resources identified its untreated sewage — drained into an estuary leading to Manila Bay — as a major pollutant of the bay; it underwent a ₱1.7-billion rehabilitation that began with a July 2020 groundbreaking; it opened partially on December 30, 2021 and fully reopened on November 21, 2022, rebuilt with glass enclosures, elevated viewing decks, a sewage treatment plant, an animal museum, and botanical and butterfly gardens. (Philstar — Manila Zoo shut down indefinitely, Philstar — Renovated Manila Zoo reopens Dec. 30, Wikipedia — Manila Zoological and Botanical Garden)

Identities

Source	Identifier	URL
Wikipedia	Manila Zoological and Botanical Garden	https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manila_Zoological_and_Botanical_Garden
Wikidata	Manila Zoological and Botanical Garden (Q2307982)	https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2307982
DBpedia	Manila Zoo (resource redirects from Manila_Zoological_and_Botanical_Garden)	https://dbpedia.org/resource/Manila_Zoo
ProductOntology	N/A	N/A
Wiktionary	N/A	N/A
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH)	N/A	N/A
MeSH	N/A	N/A
NCBI Taxonomy	N/A	N/A
AGROVOC	N/A	N/A
Google Scholar	Manila Zoo Manila Zoological and Botanical Garden 1959 Mali elephant Asian elephant animal welfare PETA rehabilitation 2022 reopening Malate	N/A
ConceptNet	N/A	N/A
OpenCyc	N/A	N/A

Also Known As

Manila Zoological and Botanical Garden

Examples and Analogies

A city’s zoo, a bay’s problem: the 2019 closure made the zoo an object lesson in watershed interdependence — a landlocked 5.5-hectare park draining into an estuary was prosecuted as a polluter of Manila Bay, the same basin-wide cleanup logic this wiki’s Malate, Manila entry records for the district. (Philstar — Manila Zoo shut down indefinitely)
The lone elephant as the institution’s mirror: Mali the Asian elephant — given by the Sri Lankan government as a gift to then First Lady Imelda Marcos and kept at the zoo from about the age of three — became, over four decades in a concrete enclosure, the national shorthand for every debate about the zoo itself: welfare, nostalgia, and the city’s duty of care. (Wikipedia — Mali, Wikipedia — Manila Zoological and Botanical Garden)
Verified institutional data:
Opened: July 25, 1959, under Mayor Arsenio Lacson; construction about a year, costing over ₱1 million; First Lady Leonila Garcia at the inauguration (Wikipedia — Manila Zoological and Botanical Garden)
Site: 5.5 hectares (14 acres) on Adriatico Street, Malate, Manila — Malate’s principal family attraction, within walking distance of the bayfront (Wikipedia — Manila Zoological and Botanical Garden)
Closure: January 23, 2019, by Mayor Joseph Estrada, after Environment Secretary Roy Cimatu’s DENR identified the zoo as a major Manila Bay pollutant; the zoo had no sewage treatment plant, its administrator noting it opened in 1959 before such plants were required (Philstar — Manila Zoo shut down indefinitely)
Rehabilitation: ₱1.7 billion; groundbreaking July 2020 under Mayor Isko Moreno; patterned after the Singapore Zoo, with a state-of-the-art sewage treatment plant, glass enclosures, elevated viewing decks, an Animal Museum, Botanical Garden, and Butterfly Garden (Wikipedia — Manila Zoological and Botanical Garden, Philstar — Renovated Manila Zoo reopens Dec. 30)
Reopenings: soft opening December 30, 2021 — the first day reserved for about 1,300 zoo workers as VIP guests; full reopening November 21, 2022; briefly a COVID-19 vaccination site for minors and seniors from January 19, 2022 (Philstar — Renovated Manila Zoo reopens Dec. 30, Wikipedia — Manila Zoological and Botanical Garden)
Collection: 549 animals (2023) across roughly 90 species (2015 count); more than 10,000 plants; annual visitors 480,000+ (Wikipedia — Manila Zoological and Botanical Garden)

Usage Scenarios

1. Family and Educational Visits

For generations of Metro Manila schoolchildren the zoo has been the first live encounter with elephants, tigers, and hippos — about half a million visitors a year before the rehabilitation, and the reopened park’s animal museum, butterfly garden, and botanical garden now carry the educational load alongside the animal collection. (Wikipedia — Manila Zoological and Botanical Garden)

2. Studying Urban Environmental Compliance

The 2019–2022 closure-and-rehabilitation is the standard Philippine case study of an urban institution forced to internalize its pollution: the DENR’s Manila Bay findings, the city’s ₱1.7-billion response, and the sewage treatment plant at the heart of the rebuild. (Philstar — Manila Zoo shut down indefinitely, Philstar — Renovated Manila Zoo reopens Dec. 30)

3. Documenting the Animal-Welfare Record

Researchers of zoo welfare cite the zoo’s flagship cases: Mali’s four decades as a lone elephant and the international campaign for her transfer, and Bertha the hippopotamus, who died in 2017 at 65 — recorded as the oldest captive hippopotamus in the world. (Wikipedia — Mali, Wikipedia — Manila Zoological and Botanical Garden)

4. Tracking the City’s Institutional Politics

The zoo’s management changes track Manila’s mayoralty — Lacson opened it, Estrada closed it, Isko Moreno rebuilt it and lent the park its renamed white Siberian tiger Kois (an anagram of the mayor’s nickname), and the Lacuna administration has operated it since the full 2022 reopening. (Wikipedia — Manila Zoological and Botanical Garden, Philstar — Renovated Manila Zoo reopens Dec. 30)

Strategies

Fix the water first: the rehabilitation’s engineering priority was the sewage treatment plant — the deficiency that closed the zoo — before the visitor amenities, an ordering the DENR’s bay-cleanup mandate dictated. (Philstar — Manila Zoo shut down indefinitely, Philstar — Renovated Manila Zoo reopens Dec. 30)
Benchmark against a model: Mayor Isko Moreno patterned the rebuild after the Singapore Zoo, importing enclosure design and visitor-flow standards rather than inventing local ones. (Philstar — Renovated Manila Zoo reopens Dec. 30)
Stage the reopening: the city opened in phases — workers first, in December 2021, the general public in November 2022 — converting a construction deadline into a sequence of public events. (Philstar — Renovated Manila Zoo reopens Dec. 30, Wikipedia — Manila Zoological and Botanical Garden)
Repurpose during downtime: between the two openings the park served as a COVID-19 vaccination site for minors and seniors — the institution’s public-health utility asserted while its entertainment function waited. (Wikipedia — Manila Zoological and Botanical Garden)

Security and Safety Measures

Animal and public separation: the rebuilt park’s glass enclosures and elevated viewing decks replace cage-front viewing, aligning barriers with contemporary zoo-safety practice. (Philstar — Renovated Manila Zoo reopens Dec. 30)
Wastewater treatment as public safety: the new treatment plant ends the discharge of untreated sewage toward Manila Bay — the specific hazard for which the zoo was closed in 2019. (Philstar — Manila Zoo shut down indefinitely, Philstar — Renovated Manila Zoo reopens Dec. 30)
Care continuity through closure: when the zoo shut in 2019, its employees kept their jobs caring for the animals, and the administrator projected a three-to-four-month closure — a plan the two-year rehabilitation overtook. (Philstar — Manila Zoo shut down indefinitely)
Veterinary documentation: Mali’s 2013 examination by the Thai elephant expert Nikorn Thongtip — commissioned amid the welfare campaign — and the 2023 necropsy after her death are the park’s most complete veterinary records in the public domain. (Wikipedia — Mali)

Historical Context

The zoo opened on July 25, 1959, the first major recreational institution of postwar Manila’s Lacson years, built for over ₱1 million with First Lady Leonila Garcia at the inauguration. For its first six decades it operated as the country’s de facto national zoo — owned by the city, funded by it, and visited by school groups from across the region now called Metro Manila. (Wikipedia — Manila Zoological and Botanical Garden)

The turn came from the bay. In January 2019 the DENR under Secretary Roy Cimatu, enforcing the Manila Bay rehabilitation program, identified the zoo as a major pollutant — its sewage flowing untreated into an estuary — and Mayor Estrada closed it indefinitely on January 23, 2019. The ₱1.7-billion rehabilitation that followed broke ground in July 2020 under Mayor Isko Moreno; the park reopened on December 30, 2021 and fully on November 21, 2022. (Philstar — Manila Zoo shut down indefinitely, Philstar — Renovated Manila Zoo reopens Dec. 30, Wikipedia — Manila Zoological and Botanical Garden)

Mali’s history spans both eras. Given by the Sri Lankan government to Imelda Marcos — a donation the Philippine Star dates to 1981 — and transferred to the zoo as a young calf, she spent over four decades as the zoo’s signature animal while campaigns sought her transfer to a sanctuary; she died on November 28, 2023 of congestive heart failure, and her taxidermized remains were returned to the zoo in December 2024 under a contract the city council approved free of charge. (Wikipedia — Mali, Philstar — Mali returns to Manila Zoo)

Challenges and Controversies

Mali’s Welfare Campaign

The campaign for Mali’s transfer — led by PETA, which alleged neglect and proposed relocation to a sanctuary in Thailand or the Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee — is the zoo’s longest-documented controversy, running from at least 2012, when Malacañang tasked experts to examine her after the singer Morrissey’s appeal, through Paul McCartney’s 2013 letter to President Benigno Aquino III, to her death in November 2023. A 2013 examination by the Thai expert Nikorn Thongtip found her “healthy in every system” though obese; the Network for Animals, normally anti-zoo, said in 2018 that Manila Zoo was then “the best option.” Her death closed the campaign; the December 2024 display of her preserved remains drew renewed criticism from animal-welfare advocates as indecent. (Wikipedia — Mali, Philstar — Renovated Manila Zoo reopens Dec. 30, Philstar — Mali returns to Manila Zoo)

The Sewage and Manila Bay Mandate

The 2019 closure was an admission that the zoo had operated for sixty years without treating its sewage — the administrator’s explanation that it predated treatment requirements became the emblem of deferred environmental compliance, and the ₱1.7-billion rebuild was the city’s answer under the Manila Bay cleanup’s shadow. (Philstar — Manila Zoo shut down indefinitely, Philstar — Renovated Manila Zoo reopens Dec. 30)

The Afterlife of a Dead Elephant

The decision to taxidermy Mali — an eleven-month process by a veterinary team under a free-of-charge contract with a private company, approved by the city council — placed her remains at the reopened zoo, where visitors now encounter the institution’s most contested resident as an exhibit; advocates called it a failure of the decency her life was denied, the city a memorial. (Philstar — Mali returns to Manila Zoo)

Aging Collection, Aging Debate

Bertha the hippopotamus’s death in 2017 at 65 — the world’s oldest captive hippo — and the arrival of a white Siberian tiger named for the sitting mayor illustrate the two poles of the zoo’s public meaning: a geriatric collection kept in the public’s affection, and a political institution that names its animals after its patrons. (Wikipedia — Manila Zoological and Botanical Garden)