As Toronto Zoo CEO Dolf DeJong puts it, his staff can’t ask the gorillas to put on a sweater when it gets cold.
But guests can choose to stay at home.
Toronto Zoo is one of the city’s most popular and iconic spots, open every day of the year with some 280 different species of animals. Last year, a cocktail of volatile weather converged to slightly dampen demand.
The massive outdoor attraction expected 1.39 million visitors to flock to its Rouge National Urban Park campus in 2025.
A combination of extreme weather and tough economic conditions, however, saw it fall short, with 1.26 million visits instead. It was also a drop below the number of visitors in 2024.
Annual budget documents submitted by the zoo to the City of Toronto cite extreme winter cold, along with summer heat and humidity, as a key reason roughly 130,000 projected visits disappeared.
“We didn’t just see regular bad weather; we saw a record number of heat waves this summer, with days over 32 degrees, ice storms in November causing power outages,” DeJong explained.
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“It was a bit of everything, and that doesn’t even take into account the impact of events in the west with that wildfire smoke and the recommendation to stay inside.”
Large stretches of the Toronto Zoo are made up of relatively exposed outdoor trails that wind between animal enclosures. On extremely hot or extremely cold days, there are few places to get warm or shelter from the heat, while still seeing the animals which draw guests to the zoo.
Facing a growing number of extreme heat and cold events, the zoo is working to pivot how it operates to reduce its reliance on perfect summer days to attract visitors.
“A big part of our planning talks about being a 24/7, 365 zoo, building out so we’re not as dependent on those peak summer days,” DeJong explained.
“You see that with what’s happening at the zoo with the addition of the Community Conservation Centre, for instance, which really focuses on serving students and weekdays.”
Several years ago, the zoo added a splashpad for summer cooldown. They’re also building more benches and working on ways to expand forest canopies to shelter from wind and direct sun.
“We’re going to have to do more work in that area as we look to stretch the year,” DeJong said.
While the zoo failed to hit its attendance target this year, officials remain confident. Next year, the zoo is targeting almost 1.4 million visits, rising to 1.42 million the following year.
Even 2025’s figures were a relatively high watermark. It marked the fourth-highest attendance in the past decade and the 11th-highest over 25 years.
Still, the zoo is cognizant that extreme weather will impact guests and animals alike. The potential for more power outages requires generators, while extreme heat can put pressure on cooling systems in enclosures like polar bears.
“Fish need to breathe no matter what, so we need to keep water turning over,” DeJong said.
“The gorillas — we can’t have them put on a sweater if it gets cold, so we need to keep it warm no matter what. So having the infrastructure in place to deal with those more extreme events has become a bigger part of our planning.”
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