Russia’s home to Europa-Park’s signature spinning coaster: Euro Mir, which just like EuroSat uses a spiral lift-hill. While legroom is not ideal, I truly enjoyed this coaster. The indoor queue and station as well as the spiral lift-hill have a great atmosphere. The actual coaster layout is very unique and we haven’t quite seen anything like that elsewhere in the World. The ride is mostly smooth and features some quite intense elements. Depending on where you’re seated, you will experience either the first or second half of the ride backwards! We advise sitting in rows 1, 2, 7, or 8! – Also in Russia is the Schlittenfahrt Schneeflöckchen dark ride, themed to the “Snow Maiden”. This classic dark ride is quite fun. Nothing grandiose, but a fun diversion that’s definitely recommended when there’s no line.
Onto my favorite section of Europa-Park: The Netherlands! I may be biased, but this area is nice and concise, the sightlines are perfect, and it’s home to Dutch food. We ended up having poffertjes (tiny pancakes) before our ride on Piraten in Batavia, and we ate our main meal for the day here as well at Bamboe Baai. Bamboe Baai is located inside the Piraten in Batavia dark ride and featured Asian cuisine. We ended up getting a mostly vegan meal (the tapioca made it Vegetarian). We love parks that have great vegan options.
Let’s talk about Piraten in Batavia! Due to a fire a few years ago, the original ride burned down. However unfortunate that event was, the park was dedicated to rebuilding and relaunching the park’s largest dark ride and we’re very glad they did. Piraten in Batavia is highly detailed, modern yet classic, and has a gorgeous queue. The ride itself features a drop, a wide variety of scenery set to regions the Dutch explored around the World, and there’s a clear story told. The mix of modern effects and classic physical sets truly made for a wonderful ride. We also highly recommend dining at Bamboe Baai, as it is situated at the end of the ride. Overall, this ended up being our favorite ride at Europa-Park and we ended up riding three times throughout the day!
Scandinavia is home to a variety of rides! Including a swinging ship, rapids ride, and dark ride. The dark ride in this area is Snorri Touren, based on the character “Snorri” from the resort’s major indoor water-park: Rulantica! The dark ride was quite impressive. While not very long, it was filled with physical sets and special effects and even went through the effort of moving individual ride vehicles off-track and into small simulators for part of the ride.
The other major attraction in the area is Fjord Rafting, a lengthy, slightly wet, gorgeous rapids ride. We did not originally think we would have time to ride, but we’re happy we were able to fit it in. The naturalistic journey of Fjord Rafting brings guests past all sorts of folklore, Scandinavian architecture, and landscapes. Definitely recommended!
Are you even a large European theme park if you don’t have some variety of fairytale forest? Europa-Park’s Grimm’s Enchanted Forest is just that! The area features a gorgeous towboat ride. Right next to it is Minimoys Kingdom, home to the suspended dark ride family coaster: Arthur. Arthur is the perfect family attraction and is one of the most popular attractions at the park.
Next up is Austria, which is Alex’ favorite area of the park! Austria is a concise forested area of the park with Alpenexpress, a powered coaster, as well as Tiroler Wildwasserbahn (log flume), a wave swinger, and a major indoor walk-through themed to a diamond mine inside the show building that both the log flume and coaster run through. All attractions were great. This is certainly one of the park’s better areas!
Portugal is another lovely area. Similarly to Greece, this area is practically based around a giant lagoon that houses a ride. We definitely benefited from the gorgeous weather matching the atmosphere of the land. The main attraction here is Atlantica Supersplash, a MACK…. Supersplash! A well themed queue meets a beautiful overall aesthetic. I was pleasantly surprised by the ride experience and overall presence of Portugal.
Last but not least (certainly not least) is Iceland! This area of the park is home to a monorail station, a splash-battle named Whale Adventures, and two major coasters. We had an awesome vegan hot dog here that our European correspondent Sven recommended!
The first of two coasters we’ll be talking about here is Wodan – Timbur Coaster. This is a massive GCI wooden coaster with great integration with the rest of Iceland. The pacing of this coaster is wild and the operations are impressive too. Despite the coaster not being as long as some other GCIs out there, the park manages to run three trains on it pretty efficiently. Definitely a coaster in the “can’t-miss” collection at the park. – Keep a close eye on the Europa-Park app as Wodan has a virtual queue option (free), along with other major attractions that will really help save time otherwise spent waiting in line. We rode Wodan with the virtual queue and walked right on!
We’ll wrap up this grand tour of Europa Park’s attractions with Blue Fire, my personal favorite coaster at the park. This is my second version of the ride I’ve ridden but the first one (Wuxi Sunac Land) is missing some of the bells and whistles found on the original. Blue Fire is glass smooth, runs a tight operation, and is very nicely integrated. The dark ride section at the start of the ride, the landscaping, tunnels, etc. really elevate this already spectacular ride layout. We ended up riding this coaster the most of any at the park.
Stay tuned for a Coaster Kings Radio episode about the park in coming weeks! While we could only truly show you some of the park in this article, we would love to take you with us for a day of action at Europa-Park in our vlog:
A big thank you to Europa-Park for having us! We had a great day! While we definitely recommend taking two days to take in all that Europa -Park has to offer, thanks to the operations of the park, we were able to successfully get so much done in just one. Let us know in the comments what your favorite ride at Europa-Park is!
