Zoosafari Fasano: the Drive-Through Safari

The Drive-Through Safari: You, Your Hire Car, and the Animals

This is not a zoo you walk around. The first hour of it, you drive. You join a road through the reserve in your own vehicle, windows up, and the animals are loose on both sides of it — giraffes, zebras, rhinos, big cats in their own fenced sections. Zoosafari opened in 1973 outside Fasano, in the province of Brindisi, covers about 61 hectares on a hillside above the sea, and describes itself as the second largest wildlife park in Europe.

We went on the second morning of the trip, as early as we could. Our plan said “early 9:00!” with the exclamation mark already in it, and that was right: the drive takes about an hour at the pace you will actually want to go, the animals are up and moving early, and by late morning there is a queue of cars nose to tail doing the same loop.

With a child in the car this is the easiest kind of wildlife there is. Nobody has to be quiet, nobody has to walk, and a giraffe at the window is a giraffe at the window. It is also air-conditioned, which in Puglia in September is not nothing.

The animals come to the car, not the other way round. Deer put their heads against the glass within the first few minutes; lions lie out under the olive trees a few metres from the road; the giraffe enclosure narrows the route so that the queue of cars crawls past them at walking pace. Our photographs from the loop run from 09:52 to 10:47, which is about the length of it.

Buy the Animals' Food at a Supermarket the Night Before

This is the one piece of advice from the whole trip that will save you actual money, and almost nobody tells you it in advance. Along the road up to the park, and again right outside the gates, there are stalls selling bags of food to feed to the animals from the car. They work because by the time you see them you are already there, with a child in the back who has just understood what the bags are for. The price reflects that.

We bought ours the evening before, at a Penny supermarket, on our way out of Polignano. Carrots, apples and nuts — ordinary supermarket produce, bought the evening before for a fraction of what the same thing costs at the gate. Penny is a discount chain, so it was cheap even by supermarket standards.

If you forget, you are not stuck: buy it on the approach road rather than directly in front of the entrance, where it is dearest of all. But the supermarket the night before is the version worth planning, and it costs you nothing but the five minutes of a shop you were probably making anyway.

Goats, Zebras and Deer at the Window: Why We Paid for Full Insurance

In the drive-through, the animals come to you. Goats, zebras, ponies and deer walk straight up to the car, push their heads against the windows and wander alongside the doors and mirrors — even more so once they know you have food. It is the most memorable part of the park, and the part a hire car is most exposed in.

None of them mean any harm, but they are big, curious and not restrained, and a horn, a hoof or a determined nose against the paintwork is exactly the kind of damage hire companies charge for. We booked the car with full insurance specifically because of this, before we left home, and we would do it again. If your rental has a damage excess of several hundred euros, one scratch can cost you more than the whole day out.

Need a car for Puglia? You can find an affordable rental at Bari airport through Localrent (affiliate link) — and if you are coming here, take the full insurance when you book.

The Rest of the Park: On Foot, and by Train

Once the drive is done you park and the day changes character. The walking half is a conventional zoo, and a large one. Our route through it, in the order we did it:

• Villaggio delle Scimmie — the monkey section, which we saw from the train rather than from the car.
• Lago dei Grandi Mammiferi — the Lake of the Large Mammals, seen from the Metrozoo: seals and sea lions in the water, with brown bears, polar bears, hippos and white rhinos around it.
• Sala Tropicale — the tropical house: alligators, snakes, lizards, tortoises, amphibians and fish, indoors and cool.
• The sea lion pool and the remaining zoo sections, on foot.

The park also keeps penguins, a dolphinarium, birds of prey and parrots, and says it has the only male African elephant in Italy. You will not see all of it properly in a morning, and with a small child you should not try.

The train is worth taking even where you could walk, partly because it covers ground quickly and partly because it takes you through the monkey village without your own car. The sea lion pool is the one fixed-time thing in the park worth planning around — we were there at 14:16.

Fasanolandia: The Fairground Attached to the Zoo

Fasanolandia is the amusement park on the same site, and it is the reason the place has a double-barrelled name: a fairground with its own rides, next to the zoo.

We did not go in, and it is not covered by the zoo ticket. The €36 we paid each was the safari and the walking zoo; the fairground is charged separately. So everything below is what is there rather than what we did — and the reason it is in this guide at all is that you will walk past it on the way out.

Know before you arrive that it is there, because a child who spots the roller coasters on the way out will not be easily talked past them. If rides are the point of your day, allow a full day rather than a morning. If they are not, plan your route so you do not walk through the fairground on the way to the exit.