300 rai of old Rangsit wetland, an hour north of the city, and the first free look lands sooner than you would think.
Ask anyone who was in Bangkok before 2018 about Dusit Zoo and you will get a story. The swan boats on the lake. The queue at the hippo pool. That specific smell on a hot afternoon.
Then it closed, and the city has been without a zoo ever since. Its replacement is now 92.54% built.
Dusit Zoo shut in September 2018 after 80 years and the animals were moved out to zoos around the country.
The plan was always to rebuild somewhere with room to breathe. That somewhere turned out to be Khlong 6 in Thanyaburi, Pathum Thani, on 300 rai of old Rangsit floodplain.
Three times the size of the place it replaces. And built on an entirely different idea of what a zoo is for.
Almost nothing has bars
The official framing is “Biodiversity Park” rather than zoo, which sounds like the sort of phrase a committee lands on. In this case it actually means something.
Enclosures are separated from visitors by dry moats and water channels instead of fencing. The animal gets more ground and more cover. You get a sightline with nothing running through it.
The renders show tapirs half-lost in forest, orangutans up real trees, a tiger stretched out by water at roughly your eye level. Whether it feels like that in 2029 is a different question. But the intent is unusually clear.
Four continents on a floodplain
Phase 2 is the ambitious half. Four continental zones: Asia, Africa, Australia and South America. Then waterfront landscaping, public space, utilities and a set of systems the operator is calling Smart Zoo.
The architecture leans into the wetland rather than flattening it. A quietly good call, for a site that spent half of every year underwater.
The part you actually want
Phase 1 is 92.54% complete. The first public look is a free opening in April 2027.
Full opening, all four zones, everything working, is pencilled in for early 2029.
So no, not this year. Not next year either. But close enough to start paying attention.
What it cost to get here
Cabinet approved 10.97 billion baht across the whole project. Phase 1 broke ground in April 2023 at 5.54 billion baht, and phase 2 accounts for the remaining 4.34 billion.
Eleven years will have passed between Dusit closing and the new zoo opening properly. That is a long gap for a country that runs on family travel. It goes some way to explaining why the design brief was allowed to be this big.
Genuinely day-trip range
Khlong 6 sits about an hour north of central Bangkok, traffic permitting. Out after breakfast, back for dinner, no hotel required.
That matters more than it sounds. Most attractions on this scale ask you to commit a weekend to them. This one will not.
The swan boats are not coming back. But from 2027, Bangkok gets somewhere to take the kids again.
Would you drive out to Rangsit for it, or is an hour already too far? Tell us in the comments.
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Images: zoothailand.org. Sources: Zoological Park Organization of Thailand, Kapook Travel, The Nation
The story Bangkok has been without a zoo since 2018. Its replacement is nearly built as seen on Thaiger News.
