Pairi Daiza

Listen for a moment. Somewhere beyond the trees, a bird calls in a voice that does not belong to Belgium. Underfoot, the path changes from gravel to stone to wooden boardwalk. The air smells of wet leaves, cut grass, and, now and then, the warm musk of large animals. You are in the Hainaut countryside, a short drive from the French border, but every few hundred metres the world around you seems to move to another continent.

Welcome to Pairi Daiza. The name sounds exotic, and it is old. It comes from an ancient Persian expression for an enclosed garden, a walled space set apart from the wild. Over many centuries, through Greek and Latin, that same idea travelled into many European languages. It became the word we now use for paradise. So the name of this park is, quite literally, the ancestor of the word paradise.

The park opened in 1994 under a different name: Paradisio. At first it was mainly a bird park, built inside a quiet stretch of old monastic land. Over the following years it grew, and grew again. In 2010 it took its current name, and the change marked a larger ambition. It was no longer only a place to see birds. It became a sequence of themed worlds, each one built around animals, plants, and architecture from a different part of the globe.

But the most surprising thing about this ground is what stood here long before any zoo. These lands once belonged to the Abbey of Cambron, a Cistercian monastery founded in 1148. The Cistercians were a strict order of monks. They valued silence, manual labour, and simple, unadorned buildings. For more than six centuries, monks prayed, farmed, and managed water here, in the same green valley where you are walking now.

The abbey did not survive the upheavals of the late eighteenth century. After the French Revolution swept through the region in the 1790s, many religious houses in this part of Europe were closed and their property sold. Much of Cambron was taken apart for its stone. What remains today are fragments. Keep an eye out for the tall old abbey tower and the weathered walls and gateways scattered through the park. They are the oldest things you will see today.

There is a quiet irony in this. The monks came here to build a walled world apart, a kind of enclosed garden for the soul. Centuries later, a park named after the Persian word for an enclosed garden grew up among their ruins. The old idea of paradise as a protected, cultivated space has simply taken a new form. Where monks once tended orchards, keepers now tend elephants and rare plants.

The park is organised into separate worlds, and each one has its own architecture and planting. In one area you walk through a landscape inspired by China, with lakes, curved roofs, bridges, and carefully placed rocks. Chinese gardens are designed as miniature landscapes, so every turn of the path is meant to frame a new view. Elsewhere, buildings and temples draw on India and Southeast Asia, with carved stone and painted wood brought or crafted for the park.

The Chinese garden is also home to the park's most famous residents — its giant pandas. A pair arrived from China in 2014, on loan as part of a long conservation partnership. Pandas are slow, patient animals. They spend much of the day eating bamboo or sleeping, often in surprisingly human poses. Since their arrival, cubs have been born here, and each birth became national news in Belgium. Watching them, it is hard not to slow down to their pace.

Not far away, the Kingdom of Ganesha takes its name from the Hindu god with the head of an elephant. Ganesha is honoured across India as the remover of obstacles and the patron of new beginnings. Here, the name fits. The area is built around a herd of Asian elephants, with pools, sandy ground, and structures inspired by Indian and Southeast Asian temples. If the elephants are bathing, stay a while. Watching a family group move together is one of the quietest pleasures in the park.

Other worlds take you somewhere colder, or wetter. One area recreates northern and polar landscapes, with animals adapted to snow and long winters. Another turns toward the sea, with aquariums and coastal creatures. There are also zones built around Africa, where open enclosures and earth-coloured buildings set the scene. The aim throughout is immersion. Fences are often hidden by water, rock, or planting, so the animals seem to share the landscape with you.

Plants matter here as much as animals. The park places great weight on its gardens, and the planting changes with the seasons. In spring, flowering trees and bulbs fill the beds. In summer, the bamboo groves rustle and the water gardens turn thick and green. In autumn, the maples and older trees of the valley turn red and gold. Even if you came for the animals, take a moment to look at what grows beside the path.

A few practical thoughts as you explore. The park is large, and the paths rise and fall with the valley, so comfortable shoes make a real difference. Animals tend to be most active in the cooler parts of the day, so the morning and late afternoon are often the best times to watch them. Some popular areas grow crowded at midday. If one enclosure feels busy, move on and return later. The park rewards a slow, unhurried route.

As you walk on, try one small exercise. Stop beside one of the old abbey stones and look past it toward a temple roof or a panda's bamboo grove. In a single glance, you can see more than eight centuries of human effort to shape this valley. Monks drained it and farmed it. Revolutionaries emptied it. Gardeners and keepers have filled it again. Each generation built its own version of a protected garden here.

So before you leave, listen once more. The foreign bird is still calling somewhere in the trees. The water still runs through the valley the monks once managed. Somewhere nearby, an elephant is shifting its weight in the sand, or a panda is reaching for another stem of bamboo. Paradise, the old Persian word reminds us, is simply a garden with a wall around it. You are standing inside one now.