Julie was only a few months old when she was captured in Africa in the late 80s.
Since 1988, she traveled across Portugal with the Víctor Hugo Cardinali circus, performing in front of thousands of people who never knew how long she had been waiting for something different. In 2018, the country banned wild animals in circuses, but the law took until 2024 to be fully implemented, and Julie was left with nowhere to go.
Until the Pangea sanctuary in Alentejo located her and arranged her transfer. On June 30, she got onto a truck for the last time: hours later, she stepped down onto a 1,000-acre site, the first sanctuary of its kind in Europe, where she became its first resident. Kate Moore, the site’s director, hopes Kariba will soon join her, another African elephant of a similar age who currently lives alone in a zoo in Belgium. After forty years, Julie finally has space to walk without anyone watching her.
