L'Oceanogràfic

The Oceanogràfic is an aquarium that is worth seeing before you look into a single tank. Its entrance buildings are crowned by thin concrete shells curved into hyperbolic paraboloids, the saddle-shaped surfaces that the Spanish-Mexican engineer Félix Candela made his life's work; he designed the complex in 1997, at the age of 87, with Alberto Domingo and Carlos Lázaro. The largest of the shells opens like a water lily, its petals touching the ground at only a few points, and its edges are so fine that the whole roof seems folded from paper rather than cast. It is a late and very pure statement of the principle behind all his work: that geometry, not mass, can make concrete stand.

Opened in February 2003, the Oceanogràfic is the marine end of Valencia's City of Arts and Sciences, the chain of white buildings laid out along the old bed of the Turia river. Across some 110,000 square metres it holds about 42 million litres of water and animals from roughly 500 species, arranged not as a single hall but as a campus of separate buildings, each devoted to a part of the world's seas: the Mediterranean, temperate and tropical waters, the Red Sea, the Arctic and Antarctic, with wetlands and a garden of more than eighty plant species in between. Many of the towers are two-tiered, so that you see a habitat first from above as a landscape and then from below as a wall of water.

The moments that stay with visitors are the underwater ones. The largest tank, some seven million litres, belongs to sharks and rays; beluga whales turn slowly behind the glass of the polar exhibits; penguins, sea lions and walruses have their own worlds. The dolphinarium, holding around 26 million litres, is among the largest in Europe, and beneath one of Candela's shells the Submarino restaurant looks out through great glass walls into an aquarium, so that diners sit surrounded by fish.

Getting there

The Oceanogràfic stands at the south-eastern end of the City of Arts and Sciences, about 3.6 km from the historic centre of Valencia, whose old riverbed has become a long green park leading straight to the complex. Metrovalencia tram line 10 stops at Oceanogràfic, city buses 15, 25 and 95 serve the area, and Alameda metro station is within walking distance along the Turia gardens. Valencia Airport (VLC) is about 12 km west.