Description

Aquarium Pula is the largest aquarium in Croatia, set 4 km south of the city centre on the Verudela peninsula. What makes it special is its home: two Austro-Hungarian coastal fortifications, Fort Verudela and the San Giovanni Battery, part of the defence system that made Pula the main naval base of the empire.

Fort Verudela was built between 1881 and 1886, 31 metres above the sea, with a pentagonal stone block, barracks and a moat. In 1903 it housed a commander, four officers and about 120 soldiers. Since 2002 its rooms have held more than 250 species of animals from the Adriatic and the Mediterranean instead.

The exhibitions take you from the Adriatic seabed, seagrass meadows and rocky habitats to the open sea, a tropical reef, the Amazon and even a desert. In the jellyfish lab you can watch jellyfish being bred, and the Gallerion exhibition combines the underwater world with models of historic Austro-Hungarian navy ships.

Aquarium Pula is also a centre for protecting the sea. Its Marine Turtle Rescue Centre, opened in 2006 as the first in the eastern Adriatic, cares for injured loggerhead turtles, which usually arrive in winter and are released back into the sea between June and October. Since 2020 the aquarium has also been the only institution keeping the critically endangered noble pen shell in its care. Every ticket helps support this work.

The aquarium was founded in 2000 by biologist Milena Mičić as a small family business and today employs more than 50 people. After your visit, take a walk around Punta Verudela, just next door.