Animal adventures: admire the beauty of nature up close

At Bőszénfa Deer Farm, less than 20 km from Kaposvár, you can safely meet wild and domestic animals. With its huge 1300 acre territory, the farm provides home to about 1500 red deer, 300 wild boars, 200 fallow deer, 150 mouflons, and 50 roe deer. While it’s possible to feed wild boars, roe deer and mouflons, deer can even be stroked. You can have a nice walk in the garden of gentle red deer, but if you want to admire these huge animals from a distance, you can do that too, from a horse-drawn carriage. Besides wild animals, you can meet several domestic animals here: Hungarian grey cattle, Racka sheep, water buffalos, goats and donkeys await you. This is what a real nature experience is like!

Lake Velence offers exciting experiences besides relaxing beach activities: did you know that the Lake’s mysterious reeds host an incomparable nesting bird-fauna? If you visit this place, with a little luck you can see great egrets, Eurasian spoonbills, great crested grebes and little grebes, greylag gooses and bean gooses, western marsh harriers and hen harriers, and reed warblers. Visit this place full of eager tweets, which was already famous at the time of Ottó Herman!

Relax in the middle of nature: the special thing about Fattyúszerkő (Whiskered Tern) and Bölömbika (Great Bittern) lookout towers is that you can only enjoy their breathtaking panorama approaching from the water. The aim of the gap-filling idea is nothing but letting the lovers of water sports enjoy the sight of nature up close when taking a short rest – this is how these quiet lookouts were born. The towers were named after such typical bird species that can often be met in the area: enjoy the soft waves of Lake Tisza with a SUP board, canoe or boat, and get some rest on top of the lookout towers!

You must have heard of the Folk Monument Ensemble fascinating visitors in the Őrség, but we also have to mention the special animals living here. One of the subspecies of buffalos, the Caucasian wisent, was completely exterminated by people – more precisely, it was thought to be extinct: a lucky Caucasian wisent bull survived the century-long hunts. The offspring of this bull live now in the Őrség, which is how the mountain bloodline could survive. Besides buffaloes, there is another species that attracts curious nature lovers: Eurasian wild horses. The animals belonging to this subspecies of these wild horses have never been domesticated to this day.

The main purpose of the only Bear Farm in Central Europe is to ensure the animals an environment similar to their natural habitat. The huge area covering 5 and a half acres ensures a great habitat to brown bears: the hollow caves, the lakes full of crucian carps and the pine forests make them feel at home. But wolves also live at the Bear Farm, which can create the natural ranking in the pack among the lakes, trees and lush vegetation. Visitors can even meet racoons, coatis and reindeers.