NIAGARA FALLS — Silence envelops Marineland.

Gone are the millions of visitors from the marine park’s glory days who came to see apex predators such as killer whales, lovable seals, sea lions and dolphins and the world’s largest pod of captive belugas.

Inside the fence, nature has come calling. Trees and bushes wrap around the rails of Dragon Mountain, once billed as the world’s largest steel rollercoaster. Its loop-de-loops now descend into a murky swamp.

Other rides have been dismantled, their parts waiting for a buyer who is set to pick them up later this summer .

Chirps, wails and splashes break the silence.

Somewhere in the middle of the seemingly abandoned Niagara Falls, Ont., tourist attraction, past King Waldorf Stadium, beyond the partially submerged rollercoaster and under the watch of the quiet Sky Screamer, a few dozen of Canada’s last captive whales swim in two large pools.

Mist spews from the belugas’ blowholes as they break the surface of the water at Arctic Cove.

Several bright white belugas “drive by,” swimming quickly on their side to get a better view of the strangers peering down at them. Others lift their heads in what’s known as a spy hop, their uniquely flexible necks combing the pool deck.

Trainers arrive with food: capelin, herring and squid shipped directly from a fishery on the East Coast and stored in the park’s commercial freezer. The food is independently tested and then given to the whales in metal buckets that bear their names: Xena, Gemini and Calypso, among others.

The melon on Xena’s forehead, used to communicate and echolocate, is squishy to the touch. The female beluga is among the oldest at the park and has lived there since the late 1990s after she was plucked from Russian waters.

Thirteen belugas, including Xena, have already moved to new homes. Seventeen other belugas, four dolphins, hundreds of deer and several dozen employees at Marineland will all soon be gone.

History is now in the making.

The biggest collective move of captive whales the world has ever seen has begun. There will be multiple moves over the coming weeks and months. In the end, Canada will have no more captive whales or dolphins.

The beluga pod, along with Marineland’s four dolphins, will move to four aquariums in the United States and another in Spain. The American aquarium consortium has dubbed the moves a “rescue,” which helped expedite U.S. import permits.

Closed to the public since 2024, Marineland invited The Canadian Press inside the park on several occasions in June and July as the end of its days drew near.

The invitation was a reversal for Marineland after it banned a Canadian Press reporter from the park under threat of trespass charges in 2023, during reporting that exposed multiple beluga deaths at the park. Marineland also pledged to stop responding to the newswire’s questions. The park kept that promise until earlier this year.

It was also the first time in more than a decade that Marineland welcomed journalists inside, other than a National Geographic film crew that documented a smaller whale move in 2021.

“There’s a perception that everything’s hidden here, no matter what we say and do,” says Andrew Burns, a lawyer who was the longtime right hand to Marineland owners John and Marie Holer and the park’s adviser.

“Now, in the midst of this critical rehousing, essentially rescuing these animals, we want to give absolute open, clear access without any restrictions,” says Burns, who rarely grants interviews.

The first two whale moves went off without a hitch. It took about four hours to move six belugas into specialized transport trucks one day in mid-July. They were hoisted out of their partially drained pools by crane in a custom-made sling, carefully lowered into large, water-filled tanks on transport trucks, then driven under police protection to Toronto Pearson International Airport and flown to their destinations in Chicago and San Antonio. The second move, two weeks later, brought a group of seven belugas to San Antonio.

“The scale of this move is unprecedented,” Burns says.

They used the same team of experts who helped Marineland move five belugas in 2021 to Mystic Aquarium in Connecticut. Three of those belugas later died at Mystic, which blamed pre-existing conditions for their deaths.

Spanish and U.S. aquarium veterinarians and officials have visited Marineland several times over the past few months as they planned for the move. There are medical checks, lots of paperwork and behavioural techniques the whales must learn before they can be moved.

“It’s like putting together an opera like Aida,” Burns says.

Marineland’s sprawling property just a few kilometres from Horseshoe Falls is set to be sold once the animals are gone.

These are the final days of whale and dolphin captivity in Canada.

ORIGINS

John Holer was born Ivan Holerjam in Slovenia when it was part of Yugoslavia in 1935. The family of vintners worked on their farm before the region morphed into a battlefield during the Second World War. He studied wine chemistry, but fled when the country came under Communist control and the family lost the farm to government expropriation.

Holer worked at a winery in Austria before dabbling for a time working with animals at Circus Krone in Munich. He eventually emigrated to Canada in 1957 in search of more winery work, which took him to the Niagara Region where he worked odd jobs, including on the dry dock of Canada Steamship Lines, news articles from the time show.

But he never forgot the spectacle of the circus world. Along with some engineers from the steamship company, he designed a ride and they sold those plans to Disney, Burns says.

In 1961, Holer used that money to buy a small parcel of land upriver from Horseshoe Falls and decided to take advantage of the flocks of tourists who came to see the famous waterfall.

He borrowed money to buy two steel tanks, which he welded together, and bought three sea lions from California to swim and perform tricks in.

“He started by charging people a quarter to come see the sea lions and another quarter to feed them,” Burns says. “He took every dime he earned and he put it back into this park for 60 years.”

From then on, Holer began buying up nearby land and growing his menagerie. Back then it was called Marine Wonderland, later becoming Marineland and Game Park and then, finally, Marineland of Canada.

The park had lions, tigers and bears alongside Holer’s growing group of marine mammals and eventually, his star attractions: killer whales.

Millions came to Marineland to see the animals every year over the decades. It was among the country’s largest advertisers for decades, spending an untold amount of money using its jingle, an earworm with the catchphrase, “Everyone loves Marineland.”

Along the way, some groups started protesting the park as anti-captivity sentiment began to take root.

Holer died in 2018, signalling the beginning of the end.

“His time is over and it’s time for revitalization,” Burns says.

Marie Holer took over after her husband died and she put the park up for sale in early 2024. The park opened to the public that summer, but only for two months and without its rides. She died in early September that year, just days after Marineland closed to the public for good.

The Holers, Burns and Marineland have long been criticized by former workers who alleged animal mistreatment and negligence, and activists who wanted the tanks emptied and the park shut down.

In 2011, some former workers went public with their accusations, saying Marineland’s water system had failed the animals, causing vision and skin problems among seals, sea lions and dolphins.

The province took notice and enacted legislation that created standards of care for marine mammals and banned killer whale captivity, but grandfathered in Marineland’s Kiska, the orca who swam alone at Marineland from 2011 until her death in 2023. She was taken from Icelandic waters as a youngster in 1979 and was believed to be about 50 years old at death.

Marineland, the Holers and Burns have long denied all allegations of animal abuse or neglect.

“You can’t believe everything you hear in the park,” Burns says.

Burns also does not have time to get into the debate around captivity or the park’s reputation.

“In the past there was a lot of conflict between an ideology that said everyone working here and everything here was bad, and carrying on with a business,” he says. “But now the business is wound down and we need to take the focus away from conflict and away from ideology, which doesn’t matter at all in these circumstances.”

THE BELUGAS

The first three belugas that came to Marineland in the mid-1990s are said to have military roots in Russia, where they were trained for mine detection, Burns says. The fall of the Soviet Union meant the trained belugas were not necessary, becoming army surplus, and were set to be euthanized. Holer, with contacts throughout eastern Europe and Russia, somehow managed to bring those belugas over as he expanded his animal collection beyond killer whales, which had dominated the park since the 1970s.

There would be several more shipments of belugas to Marineland throughout the 2000s, all from Russian waters. Marineland’s pod soon had a baby boom.

By 2019, the park had 54 belugas. That year, the federal government enacted the so-called “Free Willy” bill that banned whale and dolphin captivity across Canada, but grandfathered in Marineland’s animals. It also forbade breeding and performances.

The belugas’ health struggled in the following years.

Twenty whales — Kiska and 19 belugas — have died at Marineland since 2019, according to an ongoing tally compiled by The Canadian Press based on internal government records and official statements.

In 2021, the province declared all marine mammals at the park in distress and ordered Marineland to improve the quality of its water. The park poured millions into fixing the system. Burns says the water had nothing to do with their deaths — a claim backed up by the province’s chief animal welfare inspector, who told The Canadian Press the same thing in late 2024.

Burns says some of the animal deaths were due to old age, others were due to stomach torsion and a number were related to the federal law that forced the park to separate its males and females to comply with anti-breeding measures.

“If someone walked into your house and separated the husband and the wife and the kids … from each other, it would be massively traumatic,” he says.

“We did everything we could to stop that or control it as much as possible, but that separation, which was caused entirely by the effects of that bill, led to a high degree of trauma and then that leads to aggression, high stress, and some whales were lost because of that.”

No belugas have died since last August, when explorers broke into the park to look around. Burns says they were horsing around and making a ruckus near the male belugas, sending a few into a frenzy. Several younger whales attacked an older one, which died a few days later.

The park is equipped with a massive water system. Arctic Cove and Friendship Cove house the belugas, each holding about 10 million gallons of city water that requires a dump truck’s worth of salt a week for maintenance. Water is pumped through massive sand filters and the ozone system.

Before the first whale move in July, there were 17 females swimming in Arctic Cove and 13 males over in Friendship Cove.

Burns had for years worked on a deal to send all 30 belugas and four dolphins to Chimelong Ocean Kingdom, a park in China only a decade old and holder of a Guinness World Record for the world’s largest aquarium.

Last fall, Fisheries Minister Joanne Thompson nixed that plan, saying it wasn’t in the best interest of the whales because they would be subject to breeding and performing.

That left Burns fuming. Marineland then made international headlines when it threatened to euthanize the whales unless it received emergency funds to keep operating. The park pivoted to the U.S., its best shot to send its whales.

The transfer is also the whales’ only chance of survival. Marineland says it will run out of money within months and can no longer care for them. If, for some reason, the whales are not moved, they will be euthanized.

There are no conditions on the new permits Thompson issued, and the whales may end up performing and breeding.

Burns isn’t a sentimental man. He won’t answer questions about how he feels about the move and the end of Marineland, cracking a smile every time he’s asked.

“My focus is 100 per cent on getting these whales safely rehoused,” he says. “That’s it. Everything else is secondary.”

But others in the park are struggling, especially the whale trainers.

“It has been incredibly painful to watch a narrative spread that these belugas were simply waiting to be ‘saved,'” trainer Taylor-Lee Dell wrote recently on social media. She declined an interview request from The Canadian Press.

“The tragedy was never the love, care or dedication they received from the people who showed up for them every single day,” Dell wrote. “If these whales needed saving from anything, it was from the circumstances created by the people making decisions far above us who devoted our loves to their care.”

On a hot June day, Burns led The Canadian Press through the park in a caravan, winding around a man-made hill in his Dodge Ram pickup truck.

At the top of Dragon Mountain, said to be the highest point in Niagara Falls built for its namesake rollercoaster, the city’s skyline comes into focus.

Mist from the falls rises in the distance, floating above the hotels and the spectacle of Clifton Hill, a buzzing, brightly lit promenade in the heart of the city’s tourist district area next to the falls.

“Marineland was always a place families who didn’t have a lot of money to go to Disney, for example, could come here,” Burns says.

“I think that this area is perfectly suited for some type of development that will attract people to the falls.”

The next stop is King Waldorf Stadium, where the park’s four Black Sea bottlenose dolphins swim. King Waldorf became Marineland’s primary fictional character, a royal walrus of sorts.

His kingdom, a castle, acted as the backdrop at the stadium. But that stage has been torn down. A warehouse full of King Waldorf merchandise, Marineland-themed hats, shirts, towels and “like a million” stuffed whales, dolphins and other animals remain, Burns says. About $200,000 worth of merchandise will head to orphanages and children in need in Serbia after Michael Gruyich, a longtime friend of the Holers, reached out to Marineland with his idea.

The dolphins at the stadium — females named Echo, Lida, Marina and Tsunami — race over to see their visitors.

“They miss people,” one worker says.

Gone are the dolphin flips and tricks performed by the walruses, seals and sea lions. The splash zone is dry.

Burns briefly lets his guard down.

“I’m not going to my grave with another dead whale on my conscience,” he says.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 5, 2026.

Liam Casey, The Canadian Press