Edinburgh Zoo’s Giant Lanterns trail comes back on Friday, November 13, 2026, and this time the theme is a space safari. The zoo announced the run on September 2.
It goes for 60 nights, closing on Sunday, February 21, 2027. Entry opens at 4:45 p.m. and the last admission is 8 p.m., with off-peak and standard pricing depending on the night.
What is on the trail
More than 1,000 handcrafted lanterns, lit by around 15,000 LEDs. The Royal Zoological Society of Scotland says some individual lanterns took 220 hours to make.
New this year are walk-through planets spanning 12 meters, about 39 feet, and an owl with a seven-meter wingspan, roughly 23 feet. The zoo is also billing a 40-foot planet as the centerpiece. The announcement does not say which planet it is meant to be.
The 2025 edition drew more than 96,000 visitors.
“We were blown away by the response to Giant Lanterns returning. This year we are taking the experience to a whole new universe.”
Lindsay Ross, events and experiences manager, Royal Zoological Society of Scotland
Why does a zoo build a lantern trail?
Winter is the problem every temperate zoo has and few of them solve. Attendance falls off a cliff after October, the animals still eat, the heating bill goes up, and the conservation programs the gate revenue pays for do not pause for the season. A ticketed evening event on nights the zoo would otherwise be closed turns the dark half of the year from a cost into income.
It is also, for a lot of families, the first time anyone walks through a zoo at night. The paths look different, the crowd is quieter, and the thing that gets a six-year-old back through the gate in April is frequently something that happened to them in December.
Lantern trails are everywhere now, and that is recent
The format traveled fast. In North America, Toronto Zoo runs Glow in the Wild, and the Central Florida Zoo brings in an Asian Lantern Festival. What separates them is whether the lanterns are wildlife with a story attached or simply large and bright. Edinburgh’s pitch this year, cosmic creatures on an interstellar route, is leaning further toward spectacle than species, and there is nothing wrong with that as long as the animals in the enclosures are still the reason the place exists.
Sixty nights is a long run, and the trail opens in November for anyone who wants to walk a zoo hillside in the cold with a shooting star overhead. Tickets and dates are on the zoo’s site.
Source: Edinburgh Zoo, Royal Zoological Society of Scotland.
