Chester Zoo's Heart of Africa brings the savannah to Cheshire

Cheshire has no shortage of great days out, but one attraction continues to set the bar. Chester Zoo, the conservation charity on the edge of the city, picked up two honours at the Visit Cheshire Tourism Awards 2026, capping a year in which it welcomed more than 2.1 million visitors.

The zoo won the Regenerative Tourism Award, with judges praising its outstanding, holistic approach to regenerative tourism. It also took Team of the Year for the people behind Heart of Africa, the vast new habitat that opened in spring 2025, and was highly commended in the Large Visitor Attraction of the Year category.

Heart of Africa is the zoo's most ambitious project yet. Opened on 5 April 2025, it is the biggest African savannah-style habitat ever created in the UK, spanning 22.5 acres, or more than 17 football pitches, and designed to recreate the grasslands of central Africa.

It is home to 57 African species and features the first large-scale mixed-species paddock in the zoo's history. Visitors can watch northern giraffes, Grevy's zebras, roan antelopes and ostriches living side by side, a sight more often associated with a safari holiday than a Cheshire day trip.

The habitat is only part of the story. 2025 also brought a run of notable births at the zoo, including fossa pups, a Bornean orangutan baby and a snow leopard cub, each a small win for the endangered species programmes the charity supports. As a conservation charity, the zoo's work stretches well beyond its Cheshire gates, and every ticket sold helps to fund it, which gives a family day out a rather satisfying sense of purpose.

For Cheshire families, the zoo remains a year-round fixture rather than a summer-only outing. Its winter Lanterns and Light trail has become a festive tradition in its own right, transforming the gardens with large-scale illuminations after dark.

The awards ceremony itself was held at Walton Hall and Gardens and hosted by Kelvin and Liz Fletcher of ITV's Fletcher's Family Farm, celebrating the best of the county's visitor economy across 19 categories.

Plan a visit and check seasonal events at chesterzoo.org.