Lisbon Oceanarium (Oceanário de Lisboa)

The Lisbon Oceanarium’s tank, penguins and sea otters

The visit runs through the Oceans Building, the one built for Expo 98. About 8,000 animals live there, in the central tank and the four ocean habitats around it.

The central tank and the ocean sunfish

You meet the tank more than once on the way round. One visitor in August 2026 put it simply: “you see it from above, through the middle, and eventually near the bottom.”

Among the sharks and rays swims the ocean sunfish, or Mola mola, one of the world’s biggest bony fish. At the surface it likes to lie on its side to sun itself.

Around the tank, each habitat is a coast of its own. The Atlantic runs from the Portuguese shore out to the undersea mountains, the Pacific is a kelp forest and the Indian Ocean a tropical reef.

The Southern Ocean penguins

The fourth habitat, the penguins’, was rebuilt between November 2024 and August 2025. It’s now called the Southern Ocean, with waves, waterfalls, ice and stalactites.

It reopened with 29 Magellanic penguins and 12 Inca terns, seabirds of South America’s Pacific shore. The penguins take their name from Ferdinand Magellan, the Portuguese navigator whose expedition first sailed round the world.

Downstairs you can watch them dive, side by side with the sharks of the central tank.

Upstairs, where the old Antarctic habitat used to be, the temporary exhibition Submerged Universe fills a room with light, colour and sound, made with the French studio LesAteliers BK. Its lights are strong and flashing, which can bother anyone with photosensitive epilepsy.

The sea otters

The sea otters live in the Pacific habitat. They have around 155,000 hairs per square centimetre, the fur that keeps them warm in cold water, and each one eats about 30% of its own weight a day.

In 2018 the Oceanarium took in two male otters rescued in a weak state by the Alaska SeaLife Center.

Lisbon Oceanarium tickets, entry times and hours

One ticket covers the central tank, the four habitats and the temporary exhibitions. What you pay depends on when you go in: least from 16:00, most before noon.

On the Lisboa Card’s own list, the Oceanarium is 15% off, though its website never mentions the card. The card gives its discounts at the ticket desk, not online, so check there before you pay.

That leaves a choice between booking ahead and paying at the desk with the card. Online, the ticket starts at €25.50, and you check the slot and its price at checkout. A 24-hour Lisboa Card costs €31 and covers the metro to Oriente as well.

Tiqets also sells the two together, as the Lisboa Card and Oceanarium combo, though bought separately they come to less.

Booking ahead saves you the ticket-desk queue, though not the one to get in. In August 2026 a reviewer who arrived 20 minutes before their slot still waited in a fairly long line, while the desks stood quiet.

Crowds inside are the most common complaint in recent Google reviews, and one of them found 11:00 as busy as 16:00. So you lose nothing by taking the cheaper afternoon.

Eating and drinking aren’t allowed on the route. The restaurant, with a terrace on the river, and the café are on the ground floor, outside the visit.

Pushchairs are fine, and ramps and lifts run the whole way round. For bags there are 39 paid lockers on the ground floor. Flash and selfie sticks aren’t allowed. Nor are animals: even a guide dog has to be arranged with the Oceanarium beforehand.

An English audio guide of about 90 minutes costs €5 more. It plays on your own phone, so bring headphones. The access code comes printed on the Oceanarium’s own tickets, so with a Tiqets ticket, ask at the desk how to get it.

The Lisbon Oceanarium and Expo 98

The Oceanarium was built for Expo 98, Lisbon’s world’s fair on the theme of the oceans. It began as the Oceans Pavilion when the Expo opened on 22 May 1998, and that October, with the fair over, it opened its doors for good.

The American architect Peter Chermayeff set it in the water of the Doca dos Olivais, and the Oceanarium likens it to an island, or to a ship at anchor, ready to sail.

Next door, the Sea Building, by the Portuguese architect Pedro Campos Costa, opened in 2011 and holds the ticket desk. It stands on seven pillars, its facade clad in ceramic pieces in three shades of white, like fish scales. In the forecourt between the two buildings is a panel of 55,000 azulejos, Portugal’s painted tiles.

About a million people a year now come, which by the Oceanarium’s own count makes it Portugal’s most popular cultural attraction.

Parque das Nações around the Lisbon Oceanarium

The Expo grounds became Parque das Nações, and the Oceanarium sits at their river edge, a few minutes’ walk from Oriente station. From Baixa-Chiado, take the green metro line to Alameda and change there to the red line.

The airport is three stops further up the red line, so the Oceanarium fits a day you land or fly out. Only two of its lockers take a large suitcase, up to 98 × 40 × 75 cm, and nothing bigger can be left.