San Antonio Aquarium
6320 Bandera Rd, Leon Valley, TX 78238 United States
https://sanantonioaquarium.net/
Open now:10:00 am - 7:00 pm
About
Our featured exhibits include a wide variety of amphibians, lorikeets , a parakeet aviary, and a variety of cold water and tropical fish including sharks and stingrays. San Antonio Aquarium is also pleased to bring you our rain forest vivarium where hundreds of reptiles, Ring-Tailed lemurs, and armadillos call home. Come meet our newest addition to the family, Kiwi the sloth! The San Antonio Aquarium welcomes you to experience everything the deep blue sea has to offer with our unique interactive experiences. Guests are encouraged to hand-feed sharks, rays, birds, and fish.Get up close and personal with our red ruffed lemur, or pet one of our caiman lizards. Above all, the San Antonio A
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Recommended
Trgrin on Trip Advisor
a month ago
05/26/2022, 12:56 PM
Fun
We enjoyed our visit. Friendly and knowledgeable staff. Great place to go with young children. Feeding and touching the animals bring a new experience that you don’t get at other locations.
Jessica S on Trip Advisor
2 months ago
05/03/2022, 13:03 PM
A fun afternoon excursion, great for the family
I took my 15 yo + her grandparents to the aquarium, all had fun. The entry fee is reasonable. However, some experiences are a lot extra. The experiences cost tokens. You can get 25 tokens for $69. For example, you can look through a very dark window and catch a glimpse of a sloth, but if you want to see it and touch it, it's 20 tokens. For one person! Lemurs are 4 tokens per person. You can go in a cage with a bunch of lemurs who will sit on your lap. You can pet and photograph with them. I recommend this experience. It was fun. The aquarium has mammals, reptiles, and birds in addition to the aquatic species. There are many hands-on touch encounters available. You can purchase food to feed the animals and increase your chance/amount of interactions. These include: giant rabbits, a few species of lemur, some other small primates I don't remember, iguanas, a few different parrots, tortoise, a peacock, silky chickens, alpaca (very cool), a giant octopus, and of course, sting rays and nurse sharks. Sting ray feeding is well worth a few tokens. It was fun even for the family members who were at first a bit scared to touch them. Hint, if you are there around 5pm, they feed the sting rays and will give you a handful of food for free. The 15 yr old did not look at her phone except to selfie, naturally.I think you could best describe this place as a petting zoo more so than an aquarium. They really didn't have many aquatic species. But we did enjoy ourselves quite a bit.
Deanna P on Trip Advisor
5 months ago
01/27/2022, 13:27 PM
The Kids Loved It!
It was very interactive. They got to hold birds, pet animals and marine life and see everything up close. It was very sad to see lemurs and other small mammals in cages with no outside access or light. They seemed to be otherwise well taken care of. The gift shop has a variety of things so everyone found something they liked. Parking was easy and free. It cost me $22 to get in.
Danielle O. on Birdeye
9 months ago
10/06/2021, 15:37 PM
Second time visiting here and we still love it!!! My daughter is 2 and has the time of her life here!!! It’s amazing that the employees are SO incredibly kind and generous, and I mean ALL of them. Even down to the contractors, it’s so nice! It makes this place THAT much more enjoyable, each animal handler LOVES what they work with especially Lucy! She loves those birds so much and you can tell! This place definitely seems like it’s making some huge strides and it’s noticed! Keep up the good work everyone! We will be back :)
Colleen N on Trip Advisor
10 months ago
09/14/2021, 10:00 AM
Visitors from NY
This was a really cool place. Where we live, it costs a lot to do sloth encounters. I was able to do it a lot less here. And my husband was able to do a lemur encounter. We had a great time while visiting
Alt A on Trip Advisor
10 months ago
08/19/2021, 11:48 AM
No empathy for the animals 🐢
The place has improved quite a bit since last time we were there. The giant decaying dinosaur statues are no longer outside the front, the low hanging wires in some exhibits seemed to have been cleared, the steering wheel from the tortoise enclosure has been removed, and the tank with the two gators (next to the bird handling exhibit) now has a a heighten separation panel so it's no longer an accessible touch tank.However, this place is far from perfect, probably far from good either. Some exhibits are made with like, breeze blocks? Which has allowed gaps inside the walls. This is especially true with the front, corner exhibit where tiny hands could probably reach through to try to pet the porcupine.The giant rabbit encloser was just this elongated, oval-shaped, pit-like structure in the middle of the room. It didn't have much in it for the rabbits and looked depressing. It was like a tile floor with a cauldron (for some reason) and a fake plant.There were multiple interactive exhibits that have no employee supervision. This is true for most of the touch tanks and the walk-in iguana enclosure. Last time, one of the iguanas did manage to get out and decide to hang out above one of the koi touch tanks.There's also a fish pedicure location. Not only are fish pedicures controversial for their unsanitary and dangerous effects between both human and fish, but they also happen to be illegal in the state of Texas.The room with the fish pedicure also contained two jellyfish wall exhibits. The filter for the first jellyfish exhibit seemed to be pushing the water a little too forceful because the jellyfish were being pushed in a slow, forward-facing cycle. Jellyfish aren't much for smarts, so I'm not really sure if this kind of environment affects them. Still, it just struck me as odd to see an exhibit that looks like a washing machine spin cycle simulation for jellyfish.Also, I'm really confused with the bird exhibit next to the iguanas. It's just a bunch of bird cages with exotic birds in them. Handlers were bringing some birds out to sit on perches while the viewers stood behind a fence and watched. Was that an exhibit? An event? Were they pulled inside from the outside bird area, because this feels like an odd way to display them indoors. It was like window shopping at a pet store.There's also this Walk The Plank event where you pay to have someone dressed as a pirate that walk you to a plank, so that you can jump into the touch tank of sting rays. Imagine someone landing feet first on one of those poor guys.Then there's the most obviously, strange thing about the aquarium and that's the aquarium as a whole. There's dinosaur statues littered about. They don't seem to serve any purpose other than to just stand there. Then at some point when you want to get to the rest of the exhibits, you have to go right through an arcade. Which is an obvious money-hungry cry strategy. Putting an arcade right there in the pathway of the exhibits really disrupts the flow of the environment (Not that it had much flow to begin with). If you're somehow bored of looking at and interacting with animals, and the arcade isn't enough to keep you in the building for an extra hour longer; You can try the bounce house room! A large, entirely, green room with bounce houses and tables for a mid-trip snack.This place is like a jigsaw puzzle where all the peices are from different boxes.If there's one thing they should do, it's to have more empathy for the animals. There has been other reviews about the sake of the animal's health and it would really matter if the animals were treated less like a toy and more like a resident.
Alt a. on Birdeye
10 months ago
08/18/2021, 08:44 AM
The place has improved quite a bit since last time we were there. The giant decaying dinosaur statues are no longer outside the front, the low hanging wires in some exhibits seemed to have been cleared, the steering wheel from the tortoise enclosure has been removed, and the tank with the two gators (next to the bird handling exhibit) now has a a heighten separation panel so it's no longer an accessible touch tank.
However, this place is far from perfect, probably far from good either. Some exhibits are made with like, breeze blocks? Which has allowed gaps inside the walls. This is especially true with the front, corner exhibit where tiny hands could probably reach through to try to pet the porcupine.
The giant rabbit encloser was just this elongated, oval-shaped, pit-like structure in the middle of the room. It didn't have much in it for the rabbits and looked depressing. It was like a tile floor with a cauldron (for some reason) and a fake plant.
There were multiple interactive exhibits that have no employee supervision. This is true for most of the touch tanks and the walk-in iguana enclosure. Last time, one of the iguanas did manage to get out and decide to hang out above one of the koi touch tanks.
There's also a fish pedicure location. Not only are fish pedicures controversial for their unsanitary and dangerous effects between both human and fish, but they also happen to be illegal in the state of Texas.
The room with the fish pedicure also contained two jellyfish wall exhibits. The filter for the first jellyfish exhibit seemed to be pushing the water a little too forceful because the jellyfish were being pushed in a slow, forward-facing cycle. Jellyfish aren't much for smarts, so I'm not really sure if this kind of environment affects them. Still, it just struck me as odd to see an exhibit that looks like a washing machine spin cycle simulation for jellyfish.
Also, I'm really confused with the bird exhibit next to the iguanas. It's just a bunch of bird cages with exotic birds in them. Handlers were bringing some birds out to sit on perches while the viewers stood behind a fence and watched. Was that an exhibit? An event? Were they pulled inside from the outside bird area, because this feels like an odd way to display them indoors. It was like window shopping at a pet store.
There's also this Walk The Plank event where you pay to have someone dressed as a pirate that walk you to a plank, so that you can jump into the touch tank of sting rays. Imagine someone landing feet first on one of those poor guys.
Then there's the most obviously, strange thing about the aquarium and that's the aquarium as a whole. There's dinosaur statues littered about. They don't seem to serve any purpose other than to just stand there. Then at some point when you want to get to the rest of the exhibits, you have to go right through an arcade. Which is an obvious money-hungry cry strategy. Putting an arcade right there in the pathway of the exhibits really disrupts the flow of the environment (Not that it had much flow to begin with). If you're somehow bored of looking at and interacting with animals, and the arcade isn't enough to keep you in the building for an extra hour longer; You can try the bounce house room! A large, entirely, green room with bounce houses and tables for a mid-trip snack.
This place is like a jigsaw puzzle where all the peices are from different boxes.
If there's one thing they should do, it's to have more empathy for the animals. There has been other reviews about the sake of the animal's health and it would really matter if the animals were treated less like a toy and more like a resident.
Lianna on Trip Advisor
a year ago
07/12/2021, 01:05 AM
Small aquarium, good for young kids
This place is good for kids age 2-9. It’s very small compared to other aquariums I visited. It seems more like an arcade with some animals in it. If I had to compare, it’s like the Sea Life aquariums, but with a bounce house and an arcade. There’s not a lot of variety in the animals you see, but you do get to touch all of them and feed some of them.
denise r on Trip Advisor
a year ago
06/17/2021, 02:03 AM
A bit bizarre
The staff here is incredibly nice - with the exception of the the King-ma-jigga handler- -we fed this very tickly, crawling mammal for 16 tokens - our tokens were more than our admission and feeding the animals just wasn't all that, we actually gave away the rest of our tokens just to get out of there. The kick-a-magoo (I have no idea what this thing was called) handler was kind of freaked out about us going in the cage with them - which in turn freaked us out, of course! Don't offer an animal experience if you're not comfortable with the general public being around the animal!Again, all the other staff here is very nice and I wish they could move to a nice big, aquarium that wasn't reminiscent of a 1989 game room. If you "happen by" here while in San Antonio it won't be a complete waste -- especially for the 8 and under crew - but I don't think I would seek it out