A desert under glass

This greenhouse is called the Wüstenhaus, and it began life under a very different name. When it was built in 1904 it was known as the Sonnenuhrhaus, after the sundial on the wall beside it.

 

Back then it was filled mostly with plants from warm regions that needed shelter through the winter. A little under a century later the building was turned into a desert under glass, with sandy plains, cacti and the animals that belong there, from lizards to naked mole-rats that live in tunnel networks underground and never come up.

 

That combination is typical of this park. Behind a nineteenth-century facade sits a modern zoo, and the buildings have been reused rather than replaced, because the whole site is on the World Heritage list and so very little is allowed to be torn down.

 

The zoo itself begins right next door, and it is the oldest in the world.