Belgrade Zoo  Beo zoo vrt (), also known as Vrt dobre nade (Garden of good hope), is a zoo located in Kalemegdan Park, downtown of Belgrade, Serbia. Founded in 1936, it is considered to be one of the oldest public zoos in southeastern Europe and is the biggest zoo in the country and most visited tourist attraction in Belgrade. The zoo covers  and has approximately 1,700 animals in more than 150 different species both wild and exotic as well as domestic and indigenous. Belgrade zoo officially applied for EAZA membership in 2017. The Belgrade Zoological Garden was officially opened on 12 July 1936, by Belgrade mayor Vlada Ilić. The zoo was initially no larger than but was expanded to about 14 hectares. It quickly became one of the most popular places with the locals and even the members of the Karađorđević dynasty were regulars at the zoo. During the Second World War, the zoo was bombed twice, by the Nazis in 1941 and by the Allies in 1944, heavily damaging the infrastructure and killing most of the animals. The zoo also lost seven hectares of land. The zoo recovered over time but again faced tough times in the '80s. Animals were neglected and living in bad conditions. In 1984 the zoo received a pair of black rhinoceroses as a gift from the Prime Minister Robert Mugabe and the country of Zimbabwe. Unfortunately, they lived for just a couple of months due to bad care and lack of knowledge about this species. In 1989 Muammar Gaddafi also gave six of his Arabian camels. The government, under the pressure of real estate groups unsuccessfully tried to appropriate the space to build luxurious hotels, casinos and nightclubs. Vuk Bojović, a sculptor by profession, became the director on 1 May 1986 and was in that position until he died in 2014. He became very famous in the ex-Yugoslavia, especially in Serbia and Montenegro, because of the great efforts he made for the zoo. He made various improvements to the living conditions of the animals, brought numerous new species to the animal collection - most notably great apes, white tigers, and lions - changed the zoo's bad management, and made it a profitable business. During the tenure of mayor Dragan Đilas (2008–13), the idea of expanding the zoo to Donji Grad, which it occupied prior to the World War II, resurfaced, but the experts and Bojović himself were against it.