Apenheul

Last month I went to the Netherlands to visit family. I didn’t just get to see my immediate family, but also some more distant relatives: the inhabitants of Apenheul Primate Park.

Here’s a selection of the many photos I took that day.

Apenheul opened in 1971, and was the first zoo in the world to allow visitors to walk among free roaming primates.

The zoo is divided into different sections. The first section has a large colony of free-roaming black-capped squirrel monkeys.

Another section has free-roaming lemurs. Incidentally, the Duke Lemur Center, which has been covered on this blog many times, also lets their lemurs roam free in summer.

Look, a young lemur!

We love lemurs at The Finch & Pea. Here, have some more Apenheul lemurs.

This little tamarin got very close:

Many of the larger primates were kept at a safer distance by water, but had lots of space on islands.

These Barbary macaques had access to visitor paths within their section, but chose to stay a bit further away.

I have no idea what they’re doing to that baby macaque…

And finally, there are some non-primates at Apenheul as well, like this emu in the squirrel monkey section:

And these adorable baby capybaras!

I hadn’t been to Apenheul since I was a kid, and it’s become much larger since then. It took us all afternoon to walk around the park!

Apenheul also does a lot of work in primate conservation around the world, but that part of their website is only available in Dutch.