The King's Lions

The mane is the giveaway. It starts dark around the face, almost black, and keeps going — across the shoulders, down the chest, between the front legs, along the belly. No other lion on earth wears a mane like that. The Barbary lion did. And in Rabat Zoo, thirty-three of its descendants still do.

The Barbary lion was the largest cat ever recorded in the wild. Males weighed up to 270 kilograms. They lived not on open savanna but in the cedar forests and mountain passes of the Atlas, hunting wild boar and Barbary deer in terrain that looked more like southern Europe than sub-Saharan Africa. They lived in pairs, not prides — there wasn't enough prey for more.

The Romans discovered them early. By 80 AD, the Colosseum was importing Barbary lions by the shipload from Carthage. Nine thousand animals were slaughtered during the inaugural games alone. Julius Caesar paraded four hundred through the Circus. Pompey killed five hundred in a single afternoon. For three centuries, the appetite for spectacle stripped North Africa of its apex predator.

What the Romans started, the rifles finished. French colonial hunters offered bounties. The forests shrank. The last confirmed wild Barbary lion was shot in the Atlas Mountains in 1942.

Except the king had lions.

For eight centuries, Moroccan rulers had kept Barbary lions as living symbols of power. Amazigh tribal leaders captured cubs in the Atlas and presented them to the sultan. The tradition passed unbroken from the Almohad dynasty in the twelfth century through to the Alaouite kings. When a sultan died, his lions went to his successor — crown jewels with teeth.

When the royal family was forced into exile in 1953, the collection numbered twenty-one animals. They were split between Rabat and Casablanca. In the late 1960s, new enclosures were built at Temara, near Rabat, and the lions were consolidated. The modern Rabat Zoo opened on those grounds in 2012, and the lions came with it.

Every Barbary lion alive today traces its ancestry to that collection.

The genetics are complicated. Scientists at Oxford and Kent confirmed in 2006 that the Rabat lions carry mitochondrial DNA sequences distinct from sub-Saharan lions. They are not pure Barbary — centuries of captive breeding make that almost impossible — but they carry the bloodline. The precautionary principle says: protect them until science tells you otherwise.

A studbook was developed. Breeding pairs were matched to maximise genetic diversity. And the lions began to travel.

From Rabat, descendants were sent to <a href="portlympne.co.uk/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Port Lympne</a> in England, where a male named Suliman sired roughly a quarter of the entire European population. His sons Chalid and Milo went to Hannover and back to Port Lympne respectively. Females were imported from Rabat to zoos across Europe. Cubs were born in Neuwied, Pilsen, Erfurt, Heidelberg, Olomouc, Dvůr Králové, and Belfast. In August 2025, four cubs were born at the Dvůr Králové Safari Park in the Czech Republic — three females and a male — to parents Khalila and Bart.

Fewer than two hundred Barbary lions now exist in captivity worldwide. The largest group — thirty-three animals as of late 2024 — remains at <a href="rabatzoo.ma/en/home-page-en/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Rabat Zoo</a>, the collection's ancestral home. The zoo has recorded approximately eighteen births since its 2012 opening.

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The reintroduction conversation has started. Dvůr Králové's deputy director told the Associated Press in 2025 that preliminary talks with Moroccan authorities had not rejected the idea of releasing lions into an Atlas Mountains national park. The habitat still exists. The cedar forests still harbour wild boar and deer. The Middle Atlas still has the kind of cold-winter, temperate terrain that Barbary lions evolved for.

It is not simple. The lions have been captive for generations. They would need semi-wild enclosures first, then trial releases, then decades of monitoring. Local communities would need to be on board. Prey populations would need rebuilding. But the playbook exists — it worked for European bison, Przewalski's horse, Arabian oryx, and more recently, tigers, whose global population climbed seventy-four percent between 2010 and 2022.

The Rabat Zoo sits sixteen kilometres south of central Rabat. Tickets cost 70 dirhams. The Atlas lion enclosure is the main attraction — spacious, well-maintained, and home to the largest captive population of Barbary lion descendants on earth. The zoo is open daily from 10am to 5pm. Bus lines 7, 18, 40, and 45 run from central Rabat.

The lions don't know they are the last of anything. They pace their enclosures the way their ancestors paced the palace gardens of sultans. But somewhere in their cells, the memory of mountains persists. And somewhere in the ministries, the conversation about giving the mountains back has already begun.