Cologne Zoo opened a building called the Drachenhaus, the Dragon House, on August 13, 2026, and for the first time anywhere in North Rhine-Westphalia there are Komodo dragons behind the glass.
The house cost about 9.8 million euros gross and took a little under a year and a half to build. Inside it is a Southeast Asian rainforest: tree kangaroos, birds of paradise, a tiger python, Asian small-clawed otters, Bali mynas, and Asian ducks and pheasants. Guests move through roughly 3,000 square meters of it. The Komodo dragons have a new enclosure of about 200 square meters.
Where did the Komodo dragons come from?
The pair are a 14-year-old female named Tessa, who came from Leipzig Zoo, and a four-year-old male named Jiwa, from Randers Regnskov in Denmark.
Komodo dragons are monitor lizards, a family of long-necked, forked-tongued predators found from Africa across Asia to Australia, and the Komodo is the largest of them and the largest lizard alive. That size is a product of where it lives. On a handful of Indonesian islands with no large mammalian carnivores, the reptile took the job.
The species is not safe. The IUCN moved the Komodo dragon from Vulnerable to Endangered in 2021, largely on climate projections: rising temperatures and sea levels are expected to cut its suitable habitat by at least 30 percent within 45 years, and dragons living outside protected areas are losing ground to human activity on top of that.
The bird in the room that nobody photographs
The Bali myna is the quieter headline. It is a white starling with a blue mask, found in the wild on one island only, and it was collected to the edge of extinction for the cage-bird trade. Cologne has put a breeding station for threatened Asian songbirds behind the scenes of the new house, alongside a zoo library and a teaching room used by the university.
That backstage half is the part guests will not see and the part that decides whether a building like this matters in twenty years. A tropical house is a display. A tropical house with a breeding room attached is a display and an insurance policy.
What the directors said
“Wir sind sehr froh, an dieser Stelle auf so großem Raum so viele neue Highlights bieten zu können. Das Drachenhaus ist mit seinem Facettenreichtum eines der interessantesten Erlebnisangebote bei uns.”
We are very glad to be able to offer so many new highlights here, in such a large space. With its many facets, the Dragon House is one of the most interesting experiences we have.
Theo B. Pagel and Christopher Landsberg, directors of Cologne Zoo, in a statement translated from German
Two openings in one summer
The Dragon House is the second major opening Cologne has had this year. A new giraffe habitat, twice the size of the old one, opened in July. Doing both inside a single season is unusual for a zoo of any size, and it tends to mean a capital plan that has been running quietly for years has finally landed.
The building also got new heating, new insulation and a photovoltaic system, which is less exciting than a giant lizard and matters more to the operating budget.
European zoos have had a busy summer. Zoo Leipzig opened Feuerland at the start of September, and Tessa herself came from Leipzig.
Source: Kölner Zoo. The directors’ quotation is translated from German.
