Rimbula (Wildlands Adventure Zoo Emmen)

Rimbula grew out of the relocation of Emmen's zoo. The Noorder Dierenpark, which had operated for eighty years in the town centre, gave way to Wildlands Adventure Zoo, a 24-hectare park arranged in themed worlds: Jungola for the jungle, Serenga for the African savannah and Nortica for the cold oceans. The project cost 200 million euros in total, about 50 million of it for the entrance building and theatre. It was designed and themed by the zoo's own team with the agency Jora Vision, and VolkerWessels was the main contractor. The new park cut its collection from around 300 to about 100 species in favour of larger habitats.

King Willem-Alexander officially opened Wildlands on 18 March 2016, and the public was admitted on 25 March; 1.3 million visitors came in the first year. Rimbula, the great glasshouse of Jungola, is its centrepiece. The planting, part of which arrived from a Costa Rican nursery in 66 shipping containers, grew so vigorously that by 2021 the team was pruning more than it was planting.

That same year Rimbula entered the 2022 edition of Guinness World Records, on sale from 16 September, as the largest indoor rainforest in a zoo. A project sheet on the building work goes further and calls it the largest tropical glasshouse in Europe.

Rimbula is a vast hall on a steel frame. According to the zoo it covers 16,764 m², measuring 153.6 metres by 110.6 metres, and rises to 23 metres at its highest point; the project sheet published by AVAG gives about 18,000 m² and 152 by 110 metres. The floor of the hall lies 4 metres below the surrounding ground level.

The roof is made of three-layer ETFE film, chosen because it transmits the full light spectrum. The walls consist of 50 mm polycarbonate panels that insulate well while letting in plenty of daylight; doors and walls were installed by EdenParks, part of Smiemans Projecten. This insulating envelope helps to recreate a tropical climate while saving energy.

Conditions range from 27 °C and 85 % humidity in summer to 19 °C and 60 % in winter, and at night the temperature is lowered to around 18 °C to keep plant growth in check. An irrigation system runs six days a week in summer and three in winter. At the entrance to Jungola, a second glasshouse of about 1,100 m², the Butterfly Temple (Vlindertempel), received its steel frame, facades, roof and doors from the same company.

More than 16,000 tropical plants of some 350 species make up Rimbula's forest. Part of the stock came from a nursery in Costa Rica: 66 containers of plants travelled to the Netherlands, some of them already eight metres tall on arrival. Bananas, mangoes, papayas and medicinal plants are among the plants named. The substrate, about 8,000 m³ of coarse sand, stones, heath compost to lower the pH and wood compost, was supplied by the firm Heicom.

The hall is home to some fifty animal species, among them Asian elephants, ring-tailed lemurs, white-handed gibbons, fruit bats and various geckos; Wikipedia also lists other lemurs, spider monkeys, pygmy marmosets and around thirty bird species. The neighbouring Butterfly Temple shows tropical butterflies and a few reptiles.

Rimbula lies in Jungola, one of the themed worlds of Wildlands, which visitors enter through the Butterfly Temple. The route combines ground-level paths, the Jungle Trail, a network of raised walkways with towers and bridges, and the Rimbula River, a 300-metre boat ride lasting about nine minutes; an arena hosts educational presentations. Allow at least an hour for the hall and a full day for the zoo as a whole, which also includes Serenga, Nortica and Animazia, a covered building of about 4,700 m² with a large marine aquarium. Kept warm all year round, the hall is a welcome refuge in winter.