It was created by a decree during Raúl Leoni’s government in 1974, but was opened in 1977. The park was originally a coffee plantation called Santa Cruz (of which there are still remains) with around 630 hectares, of which 36 have been developed and 594 are intended for the preservation of local flora and fauna. It has seven thematic environments: monkey forest, bird lagoon, African plain (elephants, hippos, ostriches, deer and buffalo), South American plain (peccaries, llamas, horses, guanacos, foxes and tapirs), ring area (alligators, caimans, turtles and tortoises), feline area (lions, ocelots, pumas, jaguars and Bengal tigers) and contact area (sheep, goats, ducks). It is a considerable reserve of deciduous forests, gallery forests and savannahs, used by environmentalist communities for mountain sports and educational activities. Together with the construction of the Caracas Metro, it changed the conquest of the west of the city with quality metropolitan services at a metropolitan scale, being, in fact, the city’s largest zoo.