The zoo opened on April 25, 1974, but the years before that opening day were not idle. The property along the Saluda holds four archeological sites, and the planning team spent five years figuring out how to build around them rather than over them. When the gates finally swung wide, the result felt less like a manufactured attraction and more like a place that had been waiting. Within two years, however, the new zoo was running short of money. The Riverbanks Zoological Society was formed to raise funds, and Palmer "Satch" Krantz was hired as executive director - a job he would hold for decades, shepherding the institution from regional curiosity to national reputation.

On June 10, 1995, Riverbanks did something unusual for a zoo: it opened a 70-acre botanical garden across the river. The $6 million project added more than 4,200 species of native and exotic plants, woven through bottomland and upland mixed hardwood forests. Trails meander past sculptures and through pockets of woods so quiet you can hear the Saluda over the canopy. The zoo and the garden are linked by that pedestrian footbridge, and crossing it is part of the visit. Below, the river that defines the property keeps moving, having traveled some 200 miles from the Blue Ridge headwaters to reach this point.

In March 2014, a female Caribbean flamingo died at Riverbanks. She had been there since opening day in 1974 - the last of the original animals, the final living link to the institution's first day. A month later, two male African lions named Pesho and Sidai arrived from Lincoln Park Zoo to begin a new generation. By December 2025, the zoo welcomed grand-cubs of the lion Zuri, continuing a bloodline in the African Plains exhibit. The collection now includes Hamadryas baboons, Siberian tigers, meerkats, alligators, siamangs, and one of the world's smallest wild cats, the black-footed cat of southern Africa.

In April 2016, Waterfall Junction opened on the botanical garden side: a children's play area with a splashpad, playhouses, and a dinosaur dig pit. It was the largest expansion to Riverbanks since the botanical garden itself. Then in May 2022, the zoo announced Bridge to the Wild, a plan to extend exhibits into the gardens with orangutans, gibbons, red wolves, American black bears, and golden eagles. Phase two was approved in December 2023, with roughly $80 million committed jointly by Richland and Lexington counties - a reminder that the cross-river partnership signed into law in 1969 still works.

Riverbanks today draws more than 1.3 million visitors a year and ranks as the most visited zoo in the Southeast. The Saluda runs cold and fast below the bridge, dropping toward its confluence with the Broad just downstream, where the two rivers form the Congaree. From the air, the property reads as a green inflection point in the suburban grid - a band of forest and ponds following the river, hemmed in by I-20 to the north and downtown Columbia to the east. On Earth Day each year, the National Park Service sets up an information booth near the zoo entrance for nearby Congaree National Park. The two parks share watershed, ecology, and the slow patient work of keeping the Carolina lowlands wild.