Naples Zoo at Caribbean Gardens in Collier County, Florida

Photograph: Caribbean Gardens at Naples Zoo.jpg by Sally · CC BY 2.0 · Restored from the credited Wikimedia Commons file, normalized to the consistent attraction-card frame and converted to WebP by 1stFlorida.com. Portrait originals retain their complete composition over a softly blurred extension of the same photograph.

Collier County attraction

Naples Zoo at Caribbean Gardens

Collier County · South Florida & the Keys

Forty-three acres of zoo planted as a botanical garden in 1919, long before there were any animals in it.

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ABOUT THIS PLACE

Henry Nehrling, a botanist and ornithologist, made the first plantings here in 1919 to save his collection after frost killed what he had elsewhere. The gardens went to ruin after he died in 1929. Julius Fleischmann reopened the property in 1954 as Caribbean Gardens, adding lakes, pathways, parrots and waterfowl. In 1969 Colonel Lawrence Tetzlaff and his wife Nancy Jane, known to a generation of visitors as Jungle Larry and Safari Jane, brought in the exotic animals and opened the zoo on the first of September. The Association of Zoos and Aquariums accredited it in 2001. In 2004 Collier County voters approved buying the land by a margin of seventy-three to twenty-seven, which is why it is still a zoo and not a subdivision, and in 2005 it became a nonprofit under its own board. About seventy species live here, among them giraffes, lions, tigers, lemurs, black bears and panthers, and a catamaran runs a cruise of fifteen or twenty minutes past the primate islands on Lake Victoria

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