Source: toronto.citynews.ca
“We got 1.48 million visitors — that’s a lot of people. If you look at the size of our community with just over 1.1 million citizens in Calgary, the penetration is immense,” Calgary Zoo CEO Clement Lanthier said Thursday.
The zoo sold 100,000 annual memberships and saw an average of 4,065 visitors every day.
The adult pandas, Da Mao, and Er Shun, along with their cubs, Jia Panpan and Jia Yueyue are housed in a 2,000-square-metre, indoor-outdoor habitat.
The two adults are on loan to Canadian zoos from China as part of a 10-year deal signed in 2012. The cubs were born in Toronto in 2015.
It cost around $30 million to house the pandas in Calgary, including $14.4 million for the exhibit itself. Expanded parking lots, washrooms and restaurants were also required to accommodate more visitors.
