About the Zoo & Wildlife

Planète Sauvage (French pronunciation: [pla.nɛt so.vaʒ], 'Wild Planet') is a zoological park situated in the French Atlantic coast, in Port-Saint-Père near Nantes, in the Loire-Atlantique departement. Founded in 1992 by Monique and Dany Laurent and known as the Safari Africain until 1998, it was then operated by the Compagnie des Alpes between 2005 and 2015. Since that date the park has been the property of the multinational company Looping Group, whose main shareholder is a Belgian private equity fund of the Groupe Bruxelles Lambert. Its director is Philippe Vignaud. The park covers about 80 hectares (200 acres) of land, where almost 1,000 animals of about 150 species live, and is a blend of a safari portion visible by car and a pedestrian part which includes one of the three dolphinariums of metropolitan France, where bottlenose dolphins are presented. Since 2008 it receives between 200,000 and 322,000 visitors each year. Although not a member of the EAZA, it cooperates with researchers and finances wildlife conservation NGOs. It has been at the heart of several controversies since its opening, about a temporary human zoo in 1994, an adjourned dolphinarium project in 1998, the captivity conditions of its dolphins, which three of them have died, since 2007, and the transfer of macaques to a research laboratory practicing vivisection, in 2014.