Georgia Aquarium

The heart of the aquarium is Ocean Voyager, a colossal habitat designed to hold whale sharks, which need more room than almost any other fish in captivity. A moving walkway carries you through a curved acrylic tunnel while the sharks, along with manta rays and thousands of smaller fish, pass slowly overhead and on every side. It is meant to feel like standing on the floor of the open ocean.

The whale sharks arrived in the aquarium's early years, and their care has taught researchers a great deal about a species that is still poorly understood in the wild. Manta rays, with their broad wing-like fins and gaping mouths, share the tank and are just as mesmerizing, banking and looping in slow arcs above the crowd.

Beyond the great tank, the aquarium is arranged into themed galleries. The cold-water hall is home to beluga whales, pale and smooth with a rounded forehead they can change shape, and to sea otters that tumble and float in their kelp-fringed pool. Penguins waddle and dart through a habitat you can view from a low tunnel that pops up right among them.

Other galleries hold African penguins, a river gallery of native Georgia species, a jelly gallery lit like a slow-motion light show, and touch pools where you can feel the sandpaper skin of a small shark or the velvet wing of a ray. There is a dolphin presentation as well, a theatrical show set to music and lights.

The aquarium exists because of one man's stubborn generosity. Bernie Marcus, who co-founded Home Depot in Atlanta, decided the city that made his fortune deserved a signature attraction, and after touring aquariums around the world he committed a founding gift of roughly 250 million dollars to build one. It was among the largest single philanthropic gifts the city had seen.

Building a saltwater aquarium hundreds of miles from the ocean was a genuine engineering feat. Seawater is mixed on site, the life-support systems that keep the water clean and cold run around the clock, and the whole operation is designed to sustain animals as large and demanding as whale sharks. The result put Atlanta on the map for a kind of attraction most people expect only in coastal cities.

Behind the exhibits, the Georgia Aquarium runs an active research and conservation program. Its work on whale sharks has contributed to understanding of the species' biology and to efforts to protect them in their home waters off Asia and Latin America, where they are threatened by fishing and boat strikes.

The aquarium also takes in stranded and rescued animals, from sea turtles to marine mammals, and works on breeding programs for species under pressure in the wild. Much of what visitors see framed as entertainment doubles as a window into science that would be hard to do anywhere else.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.