The Zoo Gets Its Glow On: Cincinnati Zoo's Road to Festival of Lights
The second-oldest zoo in America — and home of Fiona the hippo — spends November building one of the country's great holiday light displays.
The Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden, opened in 1875, is the second-oldest zoo in the United States, and it has a modern claim to fame no older institution can match: it is very probably the most famous zoo on the internet, thanks to Fiona, the Nile hippo born prematurely in 2017 whose survival story made her a global celebrity and the zoo a social-media power.
November at the zoo is a construction zone with animals. The PNC Festival of Lights — the zoo's signature holiday event, built from millions of LED lights across the grounds — is installed through the fall and typically opens in the run-up to Thanksgiving, turning the zoo into the region's defining holiday evening for generations of families.
Behind the lights, the institution is a serious conservation and science operation: its Lindner Center for Conservation and Research of Endangered Wildlife (CREW) does globally significant work on endangered species reproduction, and the zoo has been recognized as one of the greenest zoos in America for its sustainability programs.
The botanical half of the name matters in November: the zoo's gardens are a trial and display garden for the region's plant palette, and the grounds' fall structure — the historic architecture, including the 1904 Elephant House and the Reptile House, among the oldest zoo buildings in the country — shows best when the leaves drop.
Zoo hours and animal visibility shift with the season and weather; the zoo posts daily schedules, and the hippos, as ever, keep their own counsel.
For Cincinnati, the zoo in November is the turn of the year made visible: Fiona's house, the gardens resting, and four million lights being screwed in against the dark.
