THE 100,000th visitor to the zoo in Košice-Kavečany in 2011, Helenka Kostolná, age 4, was rewarded by the zoo with a promotional bag containing a book, a T-shirt, a baseball cap and a mug with animal motifs, Eva Malešová, the zoo’s spokesperson, told the TASR newswire. Malešová said there has been extraordinary interest in visiting the zoo this year because of several kinds of special events.
Young animal lovers have been offered a host of special events during the school holidays. They were invited to spend a night within the zoo in a tent as well as to eat breakfast and dinner there. “A night in the zoo means hearing the true sounds of beasts of prey, the luring calls of night birds, the stamping hooves of galloping horses, the shrieking of small monkeys, the smell of the forest or of a freshly-mowed lawn,” the organisers of the special night-time events wrote.
Noc v zoo (A Night at the Zoo) offered knowledgeable guides as well as the tents and meals and the young visitors could tour the whole zoo in the dark, walk along a new educational path, and make a campfire at a designated site. This initiative by the Košice zoo and the Košice tourism organisation seeks to make their city a more attractive destination for families with children.