Finding Nemo: Palma Aquarium

One of the images of the Palma Aquarium is the clownfish, the comedian of the deep; Nemo found. This small joker in the pack of the oceans, the housekeeper-in-chief and cleaner to the sea anemone, with which it is symbiotic to the extent of having been nicknamed from the anemone itself, is a tiny specklet of life amidst the larger submariners of the seas. On a scale of one to several billion, it is amoebic within the vastness of the Aquarium and its grounds.

Heading towards its fourth anniversary, the Aquarium is an oddity of all-year attraction, the lie to the criticism of fallow-season all-closure. It is also an oddity of commercialism combined with philanthropy for the aquatic natural world, a charitableness that extends to its campaigning on behalf of the bluefin tuna. Coals to Newcastle and then back again. The tuna that is harvested from the seas around Mallorca can well end up at a sushi processor in Japan before being shipped back and served locally. So it is with the madness of the demands of current-day culinary refinement, and so it also helps to make the jellyfish of Balearic waters proliferate.

This philanthropy and campaigning comes with an educative element, replete with a classroom, one wall of which is an orange submarine. The young Captain Nemos learn from within a Nautilus, and a different kind of Nautilus, created as an archway sculpture of the mollusc's chambers, is its own portal through which you pass into this twenty thousand leagues under the sea, lavishly and lovingly reproduced inside an ocean-colour-scene blue building near to Playa de Palma.

The Nemos junior, enthralled by their clowning namesakes, can also feel. In one of the touch pools of the Aquarium, there are some gobbling fish, frantic at the prospect of food, who would have your hand off were it actually edible; their mouths like plumbers' plungers popping against flesh but finding nothing on the menu.

In the tanks are some startling weirdos. None more so than ones you can barely see. In a bed of sand carved and curved like roof tiles, one head sticks out. This is the only one-way tank in the aquarium. The sand eels are not show-offs like other fish. They will not show at all, if they can help it, and certainly not if anything is in the eye-line. The tank looks like a mistake or one that is in preparation for some new inhabitants. It isn't; there are some 70 or so eels there, buried under the sand, save for the one who has come up for a furtive look around. Then there is the dragon fish of a sea-horse variety, newly arrived, suspended in the water, unmoving, like a Hirst in aspic. Less weird, but bumblingly big is the Napoleon fish with his Josephine, a social pair that appear to be possessed of a rare fishy quality, that of recognition, of the diver-keepers.

Into the blue, the Big Blue, the deepest shark tank in Europe. The immensity of the tank, matched by what is moving around inside it, is exaggerated by the low-lighting of the viewing area. This is in common with other sections of the Aquarium's interior. The vivid collages of fish and coral are highlighted, spotlighted if you prefer, by an ambient lighting that is sufficient for human movement but which accentuates the richness of the contents of the tanks.

And outside, around the gardens, are the jungle with its damp tropical sprays, more tanks of turtles and sharks and even some unprepossessing-looking flora, an endangered species of limonium, native not just to Mallorca but to the door step of the Aquarium itself.

The Aquarium is a remarkable place. It is one that has come at no small cost. Fifty million euros or so went into its creation, and it operates with a substantial staff and with much that, like the sand eels, you don't see. There's an awful lot of kit needed to keep fish and coral happy.

Aquaria don't always have a great name, the reason being that they can disappoint. They promise something they don't actually deliver. They do things by half. This cannot be said of the Palma Aquarium. The little clownfish, the Nemos, are one of its images, but little the aquarium most certainly isn't. Big. Blue. And all year. It's the model for other attractions to aspire to.


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