Ripley's Aquarium of Canada

Ripley's Aquarium of Canada is Toronto's guaranteed crowd-pleaser: 20,000 animals in 5.7 million litres of water at the foot of the CN Tower, and the country's largest aquarium by any measure that matters — including the one every visitor remembers, the Dangerous Lagoon, a 96-metre moving-walkway tunnel through a 2.8-million-litre tank where sand tiger sharks cruise overhead trailing their permanent grimace, green sawfish rest on the acrylic above your face, and a green sea turtle named for outliving news cycles glides past on her own schedule. Stepping off the walkway to let the ceiling traffic repeat is not just allowed, it's the correct technique.

The galleries before and after earn their keep. Canadian Waters opens the show with the country's own underrated marine life — giant Pacific octopus, wolf eels, a kelp tank on a wave machine — and the lobster the size of a spaniel resets assumptions about lobsters. Planet Jellies is the aesthetic peak: colour-shifting tanks of moon and spotted jellies drifting like screensavers made flesh, the aquarium's most photographed wall. Ray Bay runs stingray flypasts with dive shows several times daily, and the Discovery Centre's crawl-through tubes put children inside the tanks up to their delighted necks. It is, top to bottom, a two-hour building — compact enough to never exhaust, dense enough to never bore.

Craft: this is one of Toronto's busiest tickets, and the queue logic is simple — buy the timed entry online (cheaper than the door) and go before 11 AM or after 7 PM; the aquarium runs late into the evening, and the after-dinner slot with the tanks glowing and the school groups long gone is the connoisseur's visit. Friday nights add live jazz among the jellyfish some seasons. Location does the itinerary work: the CN Tower is literally next door, the Rogers Centre and Steam Whistle brewery flank it, and the lakefront walk is five minutes — the aquarium anchors the entertainment district half-day whatever the weather, which in a Toronto winter is worth the ticket alone.