Inside Park glasshouse, Kobe Animal Kingdom (神戸どうぶつ王国)

The park grew out of the company Kobe Kachoen, whose name means "flower and bird garden"; the Japanese Wikipedia dates its founding to May 2004. Its founder is a bird collector. The group runs other parks of the same kind in Japan, among them Kamo-so Kachoen and Matsue Vogel Park, already described in this atlas. Kobe Kachoen opened on 15 March 2006, a date confirmed by Wikidata, in a glasshouse on Port Island.

On 20 November 2013 the company applied for protection under the civil rehabilitation law at the Tokyo district court; the park stayed open. A company of the Animal Escort Service group took over operations in spring 2014 (on 1 April according to the Japanese Wikipedia, in March according to the English one). The park reopened on 19 July 2014 after renovation, under the name Kobe Animal Kingdom: the number of species on show rose sharply and visitors could touch or feed many animals. In 2020 it took in part of the animals of Misaki Park zoo, notably Sumatran tigers.

English Wikipedia says the park is laid out mainly in and around a greenhouse, and the official site speaks, of the Flower Shower zone, of a panorama of flowers "in the glasshouse" that greets visitors passing the southern entrance. Wikimedia Commons photographs show a long, low building with glass walls and roof and, inside, paths beneath a metal-framed glazed roof, between tall vegetation and a water lily pool.

The official site divides the park into an indoor part, the Inside Park, and an outdoor part, the Outside Park; the English Wikipedia presents it as an all-weather attraction. The Inside Park has several zones, among them the Flower Shower, where restaurants, cafes and shops are gathered, the Water Lilies, the Tropical Forest and the Tropical Wetland.

The official site lists 38 plant entries tied to zones. The Flower Shower brings together hanging plants, among them fuchsias and begonias (the site's English page says geraniums), as well as ipê, angel's trumpet, jaboticaba, papaya and screw pine. The Water Lilies zone shows tropical water lilies in flower all year, with pitcher plants, Spanish moss, staghorn ferns and bougainvilleas, and small tropical fish in the pool. In the shoebill zone the site lists mangroves, costus and a banana; the Contact Animals (north) zone holds cacti, a jade vine and a welwitschia.

Animals share these settings: in the Tropical Forest, designed to mimic a rainforest, bush dogs, sloths, marmosets, tamanduas and tamarins live among the plants.

The park occupies Port Island, an artificial island of Kobe. From Sannomiya station the Port Liner reaches Keisan Kagaku Center station in about 14 minutes; Kobe Airport is only 4 minutes away, and a Shinki bus serves the park from Sannomiya on weekends and public holidays. The Inside Park can be visited in any weather, while the open-air Outside Park holds, among others, the African penguins, the capybaras and the show area. The water lilies bloom all year and the Flower Shower changes look with each season. Matsue Vogel Park, from the same group, is described separately.