or One Million Reasons Why You Should Not Swim in the Ocean
For our last day here in Lisbon we decided to…surprise…go for a walk. This time we went in the opposite direction from the Lisbon center and headed out for a 7 km walk to the old 1998 expo site and plaza of nations. After the 12 km walk earlier when we explored Belem, this was easy peasy and a nice stroll along the Tagus river the entire way. The destination? The Oceanário de Lisboa, once the largest, now 2nd largest indoor aquarium in Europe, behind the one in Valencia, Spain.
Built for the 1998 World Exposition, which had an oceans theme, it is a spectacular place to visit especially if a), you like aquariums, and b), you’ve never (like us) been in one like this before. Very cool! The main exhibit is a 5 million litre tank housing hundreds of species including a sunfish which apparently is hard to keep in a facility like this. If you don’t know what a sunfish is, google it. Pretty weird. The ‘tank’ if you want to call it that, has 7×7 meter windows on each side with a bunch of smaller focus windows covering 2 floors so you can view in the middle and at the bottom. It really is like gazing straight into the ocean.
The main tank represents the Atlantic but there are other smaller tanks representing the Pacific, Indian, and Antarctic. From all these viewing windows you can watch the interplay of various kinds of fish, sharks, manta rays, coral, eels, sea worms, sea horse, sea dragon, tropical fish, and lots of anemones. And that’s the short list. There’s other stuff in there that make Alien feel downright homey. The aquarium also has some birds (puffins), penguins, and otters.
As a bonus, there was also a temporary exhibit by Takashi Amano, an interesting Japanese dude who likes to show underwater forests. Very beautiful and we’ve included some information and links at the end.
I will let the pictures tell the rest of the story, but trust me on this, you do not want to ever swim in the ocean!
We took the train home in case you were interested.
