Florya Aquarium

Istanbul Aquarium at Florya is the answer to a very specific day: it is raining, or it is 34 degrees and rising, and you have children. It is also, it must be said, eighteen kilometres from the hotel — this is a half-day excursion, not a walk.

Getting there is straightforward and almost entirely underground. Take the Marmaray from Yenikapı or Gayrettepe to Florya Akvaryum station; the aquarium entrance is about five minutes from the exit, inside the Aqua Florya complex. Fifty minutes each way by rail, which is the honest number.

What you get is a 1.2-kilometre route through seventeen themed zones holding around 1,500 species. The centrepiece is the shark tunnel — eighty metres of curved acrylic with sharks, rays and giant groupers passing overhead, and it genuinely is the best part. There is a rainforest hall with crocodiles and poison-dart frogs, a ray pool you can reach into, and a gentoo penguin colony which is, according to the aquarium, Turkey’s first and only.

Hours are 10:00 to 19:00 Monday to Friday and 10:00 to 20:00 at weekends, with last entry around an hour before close. Allow two to three hours for the route alone; add the Ocean Giants exhibition or the Underwater Explorer VR ride if the children want it, and budget an extra forty-five minutes each.

On price: the Turkish online shop sells at ₺1,000 for adults and ₺900 for reduced categories, but those are promotional rates for Turkish citizens and you need an ID. Foreign visitors pay ₺1,500 on the English shop, or from about €35. Under-24-month-olds are free. Buy online rather than at the gate.

Two tips. Go at opening on a Tuesday or Wednesday — the tunnel and the rainforest are a fraction as crowded as a weekend at one. And you enter through the mall, which stays open until 22:00, so it is easy to turn a wet afternoon into lunch as well.