Jon Hepworth wanted to keep admission "right around the cost of a movie." That's the number he gave Colorado Springs Gazette reporters back in February, months before Jungle Reef opened its doors behind the Dick's Sporting Goods on the lower level of Chapel Hills Mall. Nineteen dollars for an adult, fifteen for a kid. It sounds like a small detail about a family attraction. It's actually the clearest evidence of what's keeping a 1982 shopping mall alive in 2026.
Jungle Reef has been open since March 20, six months now, long enough to stop being news and start being just another thing that exists on Briargate Boulevard. That's exactly the point where it's worth asking what it's really doing there.
What's Actually in the Basement Now
Walk past the Dick's Sporting Goods entrance and down to the lower level, and you'll find a space that used to be nothing in particular. Now it holds a 60,000-gallon shark tank, a 30,000-gallon stingray tank, and a 10,000-gallon koi tank, spread across exhibits built for 87 species. Roughly 55 of those exhibits feature animals that live on land rather than in water, so this isn't strictly an aquarium in the traditional sense. It's closer to a hands-on zoo that happens to have sharks in it.
The address is 1710 Briargate Blvd, Unit #010, and here's what you'd find if you showed up this week:
| Day | Hours |
|---|---|
| Monday–Friday | 11 a.m.–7 p.m. |
| Saturday | 11 a.m.–8 p.m. |
| Sunday | 12 p.m.–6 p.m. |
Every animal inside came from a rescue or rehabilitation situation rather than a breeder, according to the aquarium's own statements to local reporters. That sourcing model matters more than it sounds like it should, and it's worth explaining why before getting to the bigger story about the mall itself.
The Reason This Took Longer Than Anyone Planned
Hepworth originally hoped to open in the summer of 2025. That didn't happen. A stop-work order tied to permit issues landed in December 2024, and the timeline slid to a sneak peek in November and a public opening pushed to January 2026, according to KOAA's reporting from that fall. It slid again after that, landing in March.
Part of the delay traces back to something most visitors never think about: getting permission to keep the animals at all. Colorado Parks and Wildlife doesn't comment on pending license applications, but the agency's Special Wildlife License Administrator, Erik Slater, told the Gazette that reviews typically take about 30 days once an application is complete, with the full timeline depending on construction status and the number and type of animals involved. Reviewers weigh human safety, humane housing conditions, and any prior violations before issuing a license. Hepworth has run aquariums with his brothers since around 2016, starting with the original Jungle Reef in El Paso, Texas, two years before the Colorado Springs location opened. That history is presumably part of why the state was willing to work through the process at all rather than waving it off.
None of that shows up when you're standing in front of the stingray tank on a Tuesday afternoon. But it's the difference between an attraction built to last and one built to generate a single opening-weekend news cycle.
What Used to Occupy That Space, and What Replaced It
Chapel Hills Mall has spent the better part of two decades losing the kind of tenants malls used to be built around. Kmart closed in 2009, and the space eventually became an AMC movie theater complex that's still running today. Sears didn't just close. It was demolished to make room for a 300-unit apartment complex, erasing an entire anchor footprint and replacing it with housing instead of retail.
That's the pattern worth sitting with: two of the mall's biggest traditional anchors didn't get replaced by other stores. One became a theater. One became apartments. Dick's Sporting Goods and Macy's are still there holding down the remaining anchor positions, but the newer additions to Chapel Hills Mall tell a different story than "here's another place to buy things." Recent years brought an indoor pickleball facility and a glow-in-the-dark mini golf course. Now there's Jungle Reef.
Look at that list again. A movie theater. Apartments. Pickleball. Mini golf. A touch aquarium. Not one of those is something you buy and carry out the door. Every one of them requires you to physically show up, spend an hour or two, and leave with an experience instead of a bag. That's not a coincidence, and it's not really about aquariums specifically. It's about what kind of business can still justify paying rent on a dead anchor box when the thing that used to justify that rent, foot traffic that led to a purchase, has mostly moved online.
What This Actually Changes If You Live Nearby
None of this requires you to care about retail economics to be useful. If you live in Briargate and drive past Chapel Hills Mall on a normal week, here's the practical version: there's now a weeknight and weekend option that didn't exist a year ago, priced deliberately close to a movie ticket, open every day including evenings until 7 or 8 p.m. on weekdays and Saturdays. It's a rainy-day option, a before-dinner stop, a place to burn ninety minutes with a kid who's finished with the splash pad season and isn't ready for another round of the same three restaurants.
It's also a small signal about where the mall itself is heading. If the last three additions to the building were things you experience rather than things you purchase, the next tenant to fill whatever space opens up next is more likely to look like Jungle Reef than like another clothing retailer. That's worth knowing if you're the kind of resident who pays attention to what's happening two miles from your front door, even if you have no plans to ever set foot in a real estate office.
Erik Galloway keeps a running list of exactly this kind of change, the small shifts in what's opening and closing that add up to a different neighborhood than the one people moved into five years ago. If you're curious what else has shifted in Briargate lately, or you're weighing a move of your own somewhere down the line, Erik Galloway puts together a free home roadmap that starts with the neighborhood, not the listing sheet.
