This rural-ish family doesn’t get many opportunities to go to museums, so we spent a big chunk of our Lisboa day indoors looking at aquatic creatures at the Oceanário de Lisboa. The eye-catching centerpiece of this awesome aquarium is the enormous two-story tank full of sharks, rays, and fish. The layout of the aquarium gives you many views into this tank as you move through exhibits from different oceans. The small amount of written information meant we could feast our eyes on the animals without feeling guilty for not reading everything or forcing our kids to listen to endless explanations they didn’t ask to hear. Family favs were the sea otters, Sunfish, bright tropical fish, sea horses, and penguins.

After the aquarium, we hopped on the nearby cable car for an aerial tour of the futuristic setting of the Expo ‘98.

I didn’t document it with pictures, but the girls and I got to visit a unique yarn store, Retrosaria Rosa Pomar. In a country full of sheep, this company is the only one to take Portuguese raw wool and transform it completely into yarn for consumer purchase. Their yarns are perhaps the ideal example of Portuguese yarn: toothy, rustic, and tough. I appreciated the chance to touch all the yarn (and to buy some too!) and to read labels and see yarn from less common breeds of sheep. The girls loved looking around and touching all the sample knits too. All three boys fell apart, so we made our way back to the train and to home base in Sintra.

We missed the most popular sights of Lisboa. There is a chance we’ll swing through again on our way back to the south coast, or we might just have to see it all next time.