Getting there — this has changed completely
Older accounts send visitors to a ferry from the Market Square. Do not rely on a boat. The zoo's own figures describe the summer of 2025 as probably the last season of a regular water-bus service, and the zoo no longer lists one among its routes at all. Some city and tourist-board pages still do; they are out of date.
The island now has three bridges — from Mustikkamaa, from Nihti and from Laajasalo — and the normal way in is to walk across one of them. All three carry cycle lanes.
- From 7 November 2026, trams 11 and 12 stop at the zoo's own stop, at the entrance. This is the simplest route and it runs all year. Tram 11 comes from Pasila by way of Kalasatama; tram 12 from the Railway Square by way of Hakaniemi.
- Tram 13 runs to Nihti, about five hundred metres from the gate across the Nihti bridge. This was the year-round route before the new trams began.
- Bus 16 no longer goes to Korkeasaari. It was cut back to Mustikkamaa and then discontinued to the zoo in August 2026. Any account naming bus 16 as the way there is wrong.
- The metro reaches Kalasatama, a little over a kilometre away on foot.
- There is no car park at the zoo. The island has no public road access. The small council car park on Mustikkamaa is time-limited and fills in summer; the large garage under the Redi centre at Kalasatama is the practical alternative.
An AB ticket covers any of the public transport routes. A new entrance building opened in December 2025 and all visitors now come through it; it holds the ticket desk, the shop and a café, and it raised the site's accessibility rating substantially.
Why there are no elephants
The absence is the policy, not a gap. Korkeasaari keeps animals that can live outdoors in a Finnish winter and declines the ones it could only keep badly, so the collection runs to snow leopards, Amur tigers, Amur leopards — cubs have been born here — musk oxen, Przewalski's horses, European forest reindeer, markhor, Pallas's cats, European otters, snowy owls and bearded vultures. Two tropical houses, Amazonia and Africasia, provide the warmth for the animals that need it, and the indoor refuge for visitors who do.
One substitution illustrates the whole approach. The zoo kept hamadryas baboons from the 1960s until 2013 and then replaced them with Barbary macaques, which cope far better with the cold. Older accounts describing the baboon troop and its "king" are describing animals that left more than a decade ago.
Three other things in older accounts are worth correcting while they are in view. Korkeasaari is not "one of over a hundred" islands in Finland — the country has tens of thousands, and Helsinki alone has several hundred. No animal here is unchanged from ancestors millions of years ago; that claim is not true of any living species. And lemmings do not commit mass suicide: the story was manufactured for a wildlife film in 1958, and the animals were thrown off a cliff by the crew.
The conservation work, which is real
This is not a decorative claim in Korkeasaari's case. The zoo keeps the European studbooks for markhor, European forest reindeer and snowy owl, takes part in breeding programmes for several dozen threatened species, and releases animals into the wild: forest reindeer at Lauhanvuori in February 2025, and a bearded vulture in the Grands Causses in southern France in May 2025. It runs a wildlife hospital for injured native animals and a nature school, and funds field projects from its own income.
It is owned by a non-profit foundation controlled by the City of Helsinki. In 2025 it took in animals from a bankrupt wildlife park at Ähtäri.
Visiting in winter, honestly
The zoo is open every day of the year, and the headline animals — snow leopard, Amur tiger, forest reindeer, musk ox — are at their most active and best-looking in cold weather. That is a genuine argument for a winter visit and almost nowhere else in Europe can make it.
The honest caution is that this is an exposed, rocky, hilly island reached across a bridge, that indoor shelter amounts to the two tropical houses and the entrance building, that paths can be icy, and that midwinter daylight in Helsinki runs out in the middle of the afternoon. A short visit in the middle of the day, in proper boots, is the way to do it. Opening hours are shorter in winter and worth checking before setting out.