The name undersells the place. The Dallas World Aquarium, tucked into the West End Historic District, has sharks and rays and reef tanks, sure, but it’s also home to a jaguar, a family of penguins, giant anteaters, orangutans, and a manatee who will swim right up to the glass if you stand there long enough. Five thousand animals live across five themed exhibit areas built into a former warehouse, and the whole thing unfolds more like a rainforest walk than a traditional aquarium visit, three stories of canopy, waterfall, and cenote that you move through top to bottom rather than room to room.
Start at the top. The Orinoco exhibit opens on the third-floor canopy level, where a three-story waterfall crashes down through the center of the building and rainforest birds fly free overhead. This is where to find the sloths, hanging motionless in the trees in a way that makes people stop mid-sentence, along with pygmy marmosets, the smallest primate in the Western Hemisphere, and Pied tamarins grooming each other on an island in the middle of the room. Toucans perch low enough that guests regularly get to feed them, which is as close as most people will ever get to one.
Mundo Maya is the exhibit’s centerpiece, and its shining star is a 400,000-gallon walk-through cenote filled with sharks, rays, and sea turtles from the Yucatan. On the ground floor of that same exhibit is Ayurami, an Antillean manatee who’s called the aquarium home for over two decades and swims among freshwater stingrays and river turtles in the Orinoco River tank. Look up from the cenote and there’s a real chance of spotting the resident jaguar, prowling an enclosure built to let the cat choose between an indoor den and an outdoor yard depending on the weather, exactly the kind of animal that gives the exhibit its name, since jaguars carried serious weight in Maya mythology.
The South Africa section, outdoors and easy to miss if you’re rushing, is where the black-footed penguins live, diving and swimming in an open-air habitat built for a climate not too different from Dallas’s own. And Borneo rounds things out with a slice of Southeast Asian rainforest, home to gibbons and other primates that most visitors have never seen up close anywhere else in Texas.
Food is built into the route rather than bolted on at the end. Eighteen-O-One, on the first floor, serves an international gourmet menu built around the same reef regions represented in the exhibits upstairs, open 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Café Maya, on the third floor of the Mundo Maya exhibit, does traditional Tex-Mex with a literal bird’s-eye view down into the shark tunnel and the flamingo habitat below, open Friday through Sunday from 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. And the Jungle Café, set in the Orinoco canopy, handles the faster stuff, deli sandwiches, salads, pizza, and snacks, open 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. for anyone who just needs to refuel between exhibits rather than sit down for a full meal.
The aquarium is open daily from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., with last entry at 4 p.m., and it closes for Thanksgiving and Christmas Day. Admission runs $34.95 for adults, $24.95 for kids three through twelve, free for kids two and under, and $28.95 for seniors and for active duty and retired military plus one guest. Tickets and full hours and pricing are available at dwazoo.com, and it’s a short walk from most of the West End’s parking, which makes it an easy add-on to a downtown afternoon rather than a trip that needs its own day.
