Wilhelma
Interesting facts
- The project began when borings in the grounds of Rosenstein Castle struck mineral springs, giving King Wilhelm I the idea of a private bathhouse.
- The Moorish House overran its 1842 budget cap of 20,000 guilders about seven and a half times, so the plan shrank to a single bathroom.
- Wilhelma was inaugurated on 30 September 1846 during the wedding celebrations of Crown Prince Karl and the Russian grand duchess Olga Nikolaevna.
- The cast-iron parts of the 1852–1853 greenhouses were made in series, one of the first systematic uses of prefabrication in the Kingdom of Württemberg.
- In the whispering gallery two people can talk quietly across about 40 metres; the effect was rediscovered only in 2010.
- The water-lily pond holds about 800,000 litres and was once described as the largest heated pool in Europe.
- The Damascene Hall was the only historic building to escape serious damage in the war, and afterwards it served as a small carnivore house.
- Excavations on the site found interglacial impressions of magnolia leaves in the local travertine, a deep prehistory for today's famous grove.
- The orchid collection numbers about 8,000 plants of nearly a thousand species, and Stuttgart orchids are found in botanical gardens around the world.
- Wilhelma ran a gorilla nursery unique in Europe, hand-rearing infants rejected by their mothers in other zoos before returning them.
Why it is worth it
Wilhelma is a zoo planted inside a royal fantasy of the Orient. Its core was never meant for animals: King Wilhelm I of Württemberg commissioned it in the 1840s as a private pleasure garden at Bad Cannstatt, on the slopes below Rosenstein Castle, with a bathhouse and residence in the Moorish style. His architect, Karl Ludwig von Zanth, drew on the Alhambra in Granada, and between 1842 and the 1860s the grounds filled with horseshoe arches, slender cast-iron columns, gilded domes and tiled courts. The name, Wilhelma, was given in 1842.
A good deal of that dream survives and is the reason to come even without an interest in zoos. The Moorish House, finished in 1846 as bathhouse and dwelling with its own glasshouses, still anchors the historic garden. The Damascene Hall followed in 1864, and the long orientalist greenhouses of 1852–1853, built with cast-iron frames, curve around a formal garden where a colonnade doubles as a whispering gallery. In front of them lies the heated pond for the giant Victoria water lilies, and in spring the magnolia grove, often called the largest in Europe, turns the upper garden pink and white. The great Moorish festival hall, opened in 1851, was lost in the air raids of October 1944.
After the monarchy ended the grounds became a botanical garden, and animals arrived only after the war; Wilhelma opened its gates again in 1949 and has been a combined zoological and botanical garden since 1953. Today it covers about 30 hectares and keeps some 11,000 animals of around 1,200 species alongside thousands of plant species, and it is the only zoo in Germany owned by a state. Modern houses stand among the historic ones: an Amazon House from 2000 with tropical forest under glass, and a large ape house opened in 2013. The pleasure is in moving between a gorilla enclosure and a 19th-century Moorish courtyard within a few steps.
Getting there
Wilhelma lies in Bad Cannstatt, in the east of Stuttgart, about 2.5 km from the Stuttgart-Ost district centre. Stuttgart Airport (STR) is about 13 km away. The Stadtbahn stop Wilhelma is right by the main entrance.
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From the encyclopaedia
Wilhelma is a zoological-botanical garden in Stuttgart, southern Germany, located in the Bad Cannstatt district in the north of the city on the grounds of a historic castle. Wilhelma Zoo is one of the most popular tourist destinations in Baden-Württemberg, seeing more than 2 million visitors annually.
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