San Diego Zoo

The zoo grew out of a single moment in 1915, when physician Harry Wegeforth heard a lion roar at the Panama-California Exposition and reportedly turned to his brother and said he wanted to build a zoo in San Diego. He founded it the following year, and it has grown into one of the world's best-known zoos on roughly 100 acres of leased city land inside Balboa Park.

The zoo has long played an outsized role in conservation research through what is now its parent organization's Institute for Conservation Research, and it was the first zoo in the country to successfully breed giant pandas that survived to adulthood, in 1999 and 2003. A new pair of pandas arrived on loan from China in 2024, continuing decades of exchange between the two countries around the species.

Signage throughout the zoo relies heavily on maps and pictograms in addition to English text, and the animals themselves need no translation, which makes it one of the more forgiving major attractions for a family still building English skills.