Is Curaçao Sea Aquarium Worth It?

Yes, if you want a guaranteed, close look at sharks, dolphins and stingrays without booking a dive. General admission to Curaçao Sea Aquarium, the only venue this guide can point to in Curaçao, costs $20 for ages 12 and up and $10 for ages 5-12, as of September 2026, and already includes feeding sharks, lobsters and flamingos and watching a dolphin training demonstration. The real decision is which paid extra to stack on top: touching a stingray on a guided snorkel, standing with a dolphin, or climbing down into an underwater viewing chamber.

What not to miss

The aquarium runs on what it calls an Open Water System: seawater moves by gravity from a storage tank through every aquarium and overflows back into the sea, so nothing is pre-filtered and the water keeps carrying in natural nutrients and the larvae of fish and invertebrates that live there. Adrian "Dutch" Schrier founded Curaçao Sea Aquarium in 1984.

Featured location Curaçao Sea Aquarium Curacao, Curaçao Curaçao Sea Aquarium, opened in 1984, is an aquarium in Curacao, Curaçao. Animals on show include sharks, flamingos and lobsters.

General admission covers feeding the lobsters, sharks and flamingos and watching the dolphin training demonstration; a resident rate applies only if you can show a valid sedula.

Due to our Open Water System, all the marine life in our facility is in direct contact with the open sea.

Three paid extras go further than a walk past the tanks. The Animal Encounters snorkel ($75 for an adult, $40 for a child aged 8-12, minimum age 8) runs for an hour with 30 minutes in the water at 9am, 11:30am or 2:30pm: lemon and nurse sharks feed through special windows as you swim, and you can touch a stingray when it comes close. Ocean Lens takes you down 19 steps into a chamber 17 feet (5.2 metres) deep with a large window onto the open sea — a 15-minute Sneak Peek costs $15 for ages 13+ and $7 for ages 6-12, or a roughly 1.5-hour guided tour with a marine expert and behind-the-scenes access costs $59 and $29, with groups capped at four people. And the on-site Dolphin Academy, whose dolphins live in four connected lagoons fed by a constant flow of seawater, runs a standing Dolphin Encounter (1.5 hours, 20 minutes in the water, $114 for ages 5+ and $65 for ages 1-4, babies under 1 free) alongside a Dolphin Swim, Dolphin Snorkel and a Dolphin Scuba Encounter that needs no dive certification. If you'd rather stay dry and go deeper, Substation Curaçao runs the Curasub submarine from the same site, with dives to 450, 650 or 1,000 feet lasting one, one-and-a-half or two hours.

Tickets and saving money

As of September 2026, general admission is $20 for ages 12 and up and $10 for ages 5-12; a discounted resident rate applies only to guests who show a valid sedula. The Animal Encounters snorkel's price already includes aquarium entry. The aquarium doesn't publish a membership price on its own site; a membership does add unlimited admission and a 10% discount at its gift shop and snack bar, so it's worth asking about directly if you'll be on the island long enough to use it.

Best time to visit

The aquarium opens Tuesday to Saturday, 8am to 5pm, with tickets on sale until 4:15pm — it's closed Sundays and Mondays, so check that against your itinerary before building a day around it. Weather is rarely the reason to reschedule: Curaçao gets only about 450mm (18 inches) of rain a year and it almost never rains during the dry season, and no hurricane has made landfall on the island since the US National Hurricane Center started tracking them.

Other wildlife nearby

If you want to see animals living wild rather than in a lagoon, Christoffelpark, at the island's northwest end, has been part of Curaçao's national park system since 1978 and covers 1,860 hectares, 1,040 of them nature reserve. It protects white-tailed deer, cottontails, several bat species, the rare white-tailed hawk, an endemic barn owl subspecies and the endemic yellow oriole, and its high point, Christoffelberg at 1,239 feet (378 metres), is the island's tallest. It isn't a zoo or aquarium this guide can review, but it's the clearest way to put the animals you met at the aquarium into their natural context.