Wild Amazonia - Amazon Flooded Forest

The centrepiece of the park, this is supposedly the largest freshwater aquarium exhibit in the world at 2 million litres. It houses 10 manatees (Caribbean, as a substitute for the Amazonian species), arapaima, arrowana, pacu, piraiba, red-tailed catfish, golden dorado, shovelnose catfish, flagtail characin and more (though not all the fish are in the exhibit yet).

This viewing window measures 22 metres by 4 metres, and is one of 4 viewing points around this aquarium.

how does this look in real life? I imagine due to its scale it comes across better in person than in a photo. To me it looks quite sterile with too many upright broken trunks (as opposed to ones going right to the surface), which sort of makes it look like they were trying to recreate the underside of an abandoned wharf than a flooded forest.

Yeah I would have liked more full-height 'trees' but i guess besides cost, the broken trunks give the manatees more unobstructed swimming space. The manatees also use the broken trunks as rest points and to push-off to reach the surface.

Seeing it for the first time in person, at that moment I honestly did not think of all these shortcomings that we've been debating here. The manatees held my full attention. Of course with more visits I'm sure I'll start noticing the things I don't like.

I think it is just a lot easier to see faults from photos that aren't apparent when seeing it in real life.

This does look really impressive, although the above-waterviewing seems less good.