La Rochelle Aquarium — Attraction in La Rochelle

Practical side: Practically speaking, it was a mess. We had bought our tickets online, thinking it would save us time. Our slot was at 11:00, so we joined the line early since we didn’t know how long it would take. By 10:45 we reached the staff member at the entrance, but he told us we were too early and had to leave the line. Just five minutes later, people with 11:00 tickets were allowed in! When we rejoined, the line had tripled in length. So instead of saving time, we ended up waiting much longer. They even split the line to “speed things up,” which actually delayed us even more. On top of that, special discounts (for students, people with disabilities, etc.) weren’t available when booking online.

The visit: As for the visit itself, it was one of the dullest aquaria I’ve ever seen. First of all, it was extremely crowded – surprising for a Thursday in late August – to the point where it felt claustrophobic and we often couldn’t even see the tanks. We walked through everything in about half an hour. Some fish were kept in very small tanks, with no mention anywhere about animal welfare or what the aquarium does to prevent harm. Many tanks just looked artificial, with fish placed in unnatural settings.

There was also no clear storyline or structure. In other aquariums you often see a logical build-up (from shallow to deep water, or small to large species) but here it was just one similar-looking room after another: blue walls and a few glass tanks. There were no interactive elements, no feeding demonstrations, and no educational content about pollution, climate change, or conservation – all things you’d expect nowadays. For that, paying €18.50 is...

Wide range of sea-creatures which I enjoyed seeing when I could. Unfortunately made the mistake of going during peak season where it is of upmost importance (see the aquarium's cut and paste responses) that the maximum amount of people must crush through their gates. I spent an hour in the aquarium but it felt like longer. If you insist on this many people (200, 300?) can you please install acoustic baffling? The little kids were getting overwhelmed and upset, which created an intense sensory experience with all the hard surfaces.

You've gotta cut down the noise first, and maybe limit to 150-200 people. And you'll still be raking it in. Story of greed.

Edit: Thank you for your consideration and response. I'm glad you are sitting below the numbers allowed for emergency evacuations. This is what the report will be for that you are referring to. This is a report that does not consider comfort, usability or experience. I'd also be surprised if it accounted for baby buggies. It's not a good enough response to tell people to go at special hours when they are giving you experiencial feedback.

As a joke my first reply to your reponse was "did they include the fish tanks in their space allocation?" but I do not want to disrespect whatever poor engineer is suffering from being used...

This aquarium is underrated. It's actually not that small, with toddlers, we spent a good 1.5-2 hours in here. love the long opening hours from 10-20. Totally worth coming back to La Rochelle for. The first floor has all the local Atlantic fish (which are like fish we eat? So they were pretty ugly). But when you first come in, you come into a very cool jellyfish tunnel. Then on the upper floor, you start to see more colorful fish from Indo-pacific and that was really fun. The facilities are nice, they have some really cool sea horses that I haven't really seen elsewhere. Some tanks are low where you can look from above without a glass (a lot of confidence in people not touching the fish...) and a lot of different type of lobsters and crabs. They have a large tank with maybe 6 medium and small sharks which you can see really well. The coolest part was the sea turtle which I honestly have not seen anywhere else. Maybe this isn't world class like the Osaka Aquarium or the Okinawa one but it's pretty good and I would probably get an annual membership next time. Absolutely no crowds on an October...