A primate welfare and conservation charity has closed its monkey sanctuary site after potential buyers “dropped out without notice”.
Wild Futures said last week it made the “difficult decision” to close the sanctuary at its site near Looe in Cornwall after more than 60 years.
The charity said a rehoming process for its 26 monkeys to “carefully selected sanctuaries and organisations” had already begun.
Wild Futures initially made three redundancies in March 2025 and announced it would close its monkey sanctuary for a year.
The charity made a further announcement in June 2025 that it would be selling the sanctuary amid financial difficulties.
Wild Futures restructured and went from a team of 14 employees to nine as a result, the charity said at the time.
The charity recorded income of £541,181, costs of £716,789 and had 18 staff according to its latest accounts, for the year to the end of March 2025.
In a statement last week, Wild Futures said it believed it had found a buyer at the end of last year.
“The plan was to work in partnership with the new site owners to continue the work of the sanctuary, while they took on responsibility for the long-term maintenance and care of the site,” the statement said.
“To our dismay, following six months of intense negotiations, those buyers dropped out without notice, leaving our long-term plan for the sanctuary up in the air.
“Furthermore, a detailed land assessment carried out during the negotiations highlighted that our sanctuary site has begun to develop structural issues that increasingly make it unfit for purpose and no longer suitable as a long-term sanctuary.”
The charity said it would be irresponsible to invest “hundreds of thousands of pounds” into a site that was “no longer suitable for the sanctuary’s long-term future” and whose maintenance “now far surpasses the financial resources we have available to us”.
It said it did not yet know how many potential redundancies could be made as a result of the sale falling through.
The charity said it planned to launch an emergency appeal to cover the “significant costs” of safely rehoming its monkeys.