Just don't touch the chickens 🐔 #shorts

There's a working farm inside a public park in Englewood, and most people have no idea it exists. I didn't for a long time. My wife found it, we took the kids, and now it's one of those places I find myself recommending when people ask about summer things to do that don't cost a fortune or require a two-hour drive.

The place is called Englewood Farm and Train at Belleview Park, and the name basically tells you what you're getting. A small farm. A train. A park. It's not trying to be anything more than that, which is probably why it works.

Englewood Farm and Train at Belleview Park

The train ride is $5, which in 2024 feels almost suspiciously affordable. You loop around the park, the kids love it, and it takes maybe ten minutes — just long enough to feel like a real thing you did. The petting zoo attached to the farm has pigs, cows, goats, sheep, and alpacas, and it's genuinely well-kept. I've been to petting zoos where the animals look miserable and the whole thing smells like a mistake. This one didn't feel like that. The animals seemed fine with being there, and the setup was clean enough that I wasn't counting down the minutes until we could leave.

The chickens, for the record, are not part of the petting portion. Hence the title of the video. My youngest figured this out the hard way — not in a traumatic way, just in a "that chicken did not appreciate the attention" kind of way. The sign probably says don't touch the chickens. We didn't read the sign carefully enough.

What I like about this place is that it's free to walk through the park itself — you're only paying for the train ride. So if you've got a toddler who loses interest in thirty seconds, you're not out anything significant. Belleview Park has open green space, a playground, and enough room to just let kids run around while you sit somewhere and decompress. It doesn't try to pack in too many activities or upsell you at every turn. You show up, you look at some animals, you maybe ride the train, you go home. That's the whole thing, and that's fine.

The farm is small. I want to be clear about that so nobody shows up expecting something on the scale of a state fair operation. This is a neighborhood-sized attraction — a few enclosures, a friendly staff, and a train track that circles the park. If you're coming from far north Denver or somewhere like Castle Rock, I'd pair it with something else in the Englewood or Greenwood Village area to make the trip feel more purposeful. But if you're already in the south suburbs, it's an easy stop that doesn't require planning, reservations, or much of anything.

Birthday parties are apparently a thing here too. I haven't done one personally, but I can see it — affordable, outdoors, built-in entertainment, and you don't have to spend three hours cleaning your house afterward. For a kids' birthday in the four-to-eight age range, it probably works really well.

The Englewood and Greenwood Village area gets overlooked pretty consistently by people who treat Denver like it ends at Broadway. That's a mistake, and Belleview Park is one small example of why. It's the kind of low-stakes afternoon that's easy to dismiss on paper and ends up being the thing your kid talks about for two weeks because they saw an alpaca.

Summer is the obvious time to go — the farm is most active, the train is running, and the park is at its best when you can actually use the green space. I don't have specifics on their off-season hours or what's open in January, so I'd check the City of Englewood's website before making a winter trip out of it.

Parking is in a surface lot off South Floyd Avenue, and on a busy weekend afternoon you might circle once or twice. It's not a nightmare. Just don't show up at 1pm on a Saturday in July and expect to walk right in to an empty lot.

If you've got young kids and you're trying to squeeze something out of the summer that doesn't involve a screen, this is a legitimately good option. It's not flashy. It costs almost nothing. And the chickens will remind you that not every animal is interested in being your friend, which is honestly a decent lesson for everyone.

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A few notes since this is technically a roundup and I want to give you enough to actually plan something:

Belleview Park itself has been a public park for decades and it sits in a quiet residential part of Englewood that doesn't get much traffic from people outside the neighborhood. The farm component makes it distinctive — most municipal parks don't have a working farm attached, and the fact that this one has been maintained well is worth acknowledging. It's not a tourist attraction. It's a neighborhood park that happens to have goats and a train, and it's better for that.

If you're making a day of it in the area, Greenwood Village and south Englewood have enough going on that you don't need to drive back up to Denver proper. I've covered other spots in that corridor before and will keep adding to it — the south suburbs have a tendency to fly under the radar, and some of that is deserved, but not all of it.

The farm and train are worth about two hours of your time, maybe three if your kids are deeply invested in watching a pig eat. Go on a weekday if you can. The energy is more relaxed, the parking is easier, and you'll have more room to actually enjoy it without feeling like you're navigating a crowd. It's a good afternoon.