Almuñécar's mythological aquarium gallery

The project, promoted by Almuñécar town hall, has been coordinated by the councillor for parks, Carlos Ferrón, who said, "The work is very well done."

The first graffiti arrived at the venue back in 2014, when the renowned Granada artist Raúl Ruiz, known as El Niño de las Pinturas, left his mark on the entrance. A decade later, this work has been restored to restore the brightness and colours that the passage of time had dulled.

Last year, with the opening of the aquarium after years of closure, the Belgian artist Kevin Lamy Stiers, known in the street art world as Kiwi Wall Art, was commissioned to bring it back to life and colour. In total, the aquarium now has four large murals on the inside and outside walls.

Four large-scale works which, according to Ferrón, are "the most representative of the aquarium right now". One of them alone, which occupies one of the curves of the building, has a surface area of approximately 60 square metres.

One of the murals traces the evolution of life in the oceans from the Cambrian, more than five hundred million years ago, through the Devonian, known as the "age of fish", to the seas of today. Octopuses descended from ancient molluscs, nautilus that recall what the primitive seas were like, Mediterranean species that still swim in the waters that bathe the coast of Granada.

Kiwi Wall Art has also included some mythology in his murals, so that among fish and corals, Atlas appears, the titan of Greek mythology, that giant condemned to carry the weight of the sky on his shoulders. Only here, instead of the sky, Atlas holds a tectonic plate. A way of uniting the geological and the legendary, of reminding us that the Earth also has its own epic.

Ferrón pointed out that this commitment to art will be continued: "The aquarium itself will become a work of art along the entire route, thus offering an additional attraction to those of the Mediterranean fauna aquariums. It will be like a great underwater stage in which fantastic art will swim among sharks.

The area is home to more than a hundred species and more than 1,500 animals including fish, crabs, sea bream, rays, starfish, sea cucumbers and other species.

It opened for the first time in 2008, but from 2010 it began to suffer intermittent closures until, in November 2021, it finally closed its doors. After being closed for four years, last year it reopened its doors after an investment of over 250,000 euros, financed with municipal funds and an insurance contribution following the breakage of one of the large fish tanks years ago.