La Vallée des Singes -

Totally worth it. (Even tho it is a bit pricey - €13.50 for Adults and €8.50 for under 12s). It is well signposted from Civray.

Most of the monkeys are free and running about, and in the trees around you. The bigger nasty brutes like chimps, gorillas, mandrills are on their own islands.

The guides/keepers fed the animals at displayed times and gave a little schpiel, describing the troops, who were the dominant males and females, describing their behaviour etc. I learned a bunch of stuff I didn't know before.

The park has been running for 10 years and many of the monkeys and apes have been bred there. There were spider monkeys and capucins, chimps, gorillas, howler monkeys, lemurs, gibbons, tamarins, marmosets and colobus.

When the sun came out, the lemurs all trooped off to a sunny bit of lawn and sat facing the sun with their arms open and eyses closed. Very Zen. They were right amongst us and you could have reached out and touched them.


Blogger won't let me upload pictures for some reason. I just get error codes.
Zen-like lemures and cute as pie squirrel monkeys will be on display when Blogger gets its act together.
update: Lemur pic uploaded, More later