The land was once the medieval manor of Årsmarke, at one point the largest private estate in Denmark, and in 1714 it became the seat of the new county of Knuthenborg. What turned it into a defined place was one man's project. Eggert Christoffer Knuth, born in 1838, had a wall thrown up around the property in 1867 - 7.4 kilometres of it, built from stones fished out of the Smålandsfarvandet, the shallow water between Lolland and Zealand. He died in 1874, at thirty-six, six years after starting it. The wall is still the park's boundary, and everything that has happened inside it since has happened within a line drawn by a young man dredging rocks out of the Baltic.

Knuth hired the English landscape architect Edward Milner, whose plans were completed in 1870, and gave him a brief that had nothing to do with animals. Milner laid out a landscape park for a world collection of rare plants. Several hundred species of exotic shrubs and trees went into the ground, along with the rhododendrons that still draw people here in late spring, when the flowering is the point of the visit. The arboretum survived the decline of the great estates because it was formally protected under a preservation order in 1926, which is why a Victorian plant collection is still standing on an island where almost everything else became farmland. Walking it now, the giraffes are the novelty and the trees are the older achievement.

The animals arrived in stages. In 1950 an enclosed zoological garden was laid out beside Svanesøen, the swan lake, stocked with seventy deer. The safari park proper opened in 1969 under Adam W. Knuth, and the collection has grown across the decades to more than forty species with a strong emphasis on mammals. The park covers 660 hectares in total, of which 400 are the safari park itself, threaded with 23 kilometres of road. Siberian tigers hold what is described as the largest enclosure for the species in Europe. There are walk-through enclosures where lemurs and red-necked wallabies move around visitors rather than behind them, and pens of West African dwarf goats where children can touch an animal if the animal agrees.

Some of Knuthenborg's residents are here because other places stopped being possible. When Denmark banned wild animals in circuses, the country's last four circus elephants - Djungla, Jenny, Ramboline and Sarah - were bought out of the industry and given a 14-hectare enclosure here; African bush elephants had never been kept at the park before. Lions arrived in 2022, moved out of a Ukrainian zoo because of the Russian invasion. Neither species was part of the plan. Both are now part of the park, which has quietly become the place in this corner of Europe that takes the animals when the arrangement they were born into collapses.

The Museum of Evolution opened in 2023 and is not a gift-shop dinosaur display. Its centrepiece is Big Joe, an Allosaurus about 9 metres long and more than 95 percent complete, among the largest and most intact ever found. Alongside it: a Torosaurus named Adam carrying the largest known dinosaur skull, the holotype specimen of Lokiceratops - the individual fossil by which the entire species is defined - dinosaur eggs, Dimetrodon and other Permian animals, the giant ground sloth Eremotherium, and the Archaeopteryx. Outside, the Dinosaur Forest sets full-scale models among the trees. The rest of the park is aggressively family-shaped: Denmark's largest nature playground, a water playground, trampolines, a family roller coaster and a water coaster. Around 310,000 people came in 2019, up from 223,000 in 2012. It closes for the winter, which on Lolland is a reasonable decision for everyone involved.