We’re very fond of aquariums so when we realised there was one on the way towards where we were intending to visit anyway during our unexpected port call to A Coruña we diverted towards it.
This was Aquarium Finisterrae, opened in 1999, just on the coast near the Tower of Hercules, and home to a number of themed areas relating to different oceanic ecosystems.
Upon entering we had the chance to use the toilets then admire a lot of marine-themed photography lining the walls, but we didn’t have too long as we’d been told that the seals would soon be fed outside if we wanted to see them, and we decided we did.
There were some lovely rock formations on the shoreline outside the aquarium, making for plenty of pretty pictures.
A fair-sized crowd of visitors were already crowding around the pool area where the seals were fed as part of a reward system that involved them being given health checks by aquarium staff. It was interesting to see that the seals knew the order in which they would be called up because there were six of them and only two staff members so only two could be treated and fed at a time. The remaining seals swam around and kept an eye on things until they knew it was their turn.
We headed back into the main aquarium building before the seal-feeding had finished to get ahead of the crowd and made our way first to the Nautilus Room. Posters from the book and movie Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea lined the route to a themed environment based on the Jules Verne work and it was nice to sit down in front of the large tanks and listen to organ music playing.
We passed through other rooms in the aquarium with tanks focussed on marine life local to the Galician coast and also others more generally Atlantic. The size and clarity of the tanks in Aquarium Finisterrae was very good.
To finish this brief look at the aquarium from our visit in 2024 here are three photos of the most interesting specimens to me. I think the starfish is Luidia ciliaris given that it has seven arms. We’d not seen one with seven arms before. The giant sea snail was a first for us too. Finally, there’s the gorgeous cuttlefish. We both have a fascination with any creature from the cephalopod class as there’s something so otherworldly and intelligent about them.
In the next and final post in this Ventura cruise travelogue series we’ll complete our visit to A Coruña as we head to the Tower of Hercules. If you’ve read the posts from this series where we visited Lisbon then you won’t be surprised at how that turns out.