Efteling theme park in The Netherlands is a fairytale themed amusement park, with its attractions based around myths, legends and folklore. It opened in 1952, making it one of the world’s oldest theme parks! Every attraction has it’s own story and the entire park is themed, making it feel like you’ve stepped into another world.
We visited Efteling while staying at Beekse Bergen, around a 20 minute drive away. The theme park is open throughout the year. During August the park opens at 10am and closes at 10pm, after the musical water fountain show. We stayed the full 12 hours and had the most incredible time, in fact we could have happily done another day as well! The entrance to Efteling is an impressive building called The House Of The Five Senses. The five peaks of the wooden building symbolise the five senses for exploring Efteling. Park mascot Pardoes can often be seen there greeting guests!
We wandered along the cobbled streets, admiring the architecture of the buildings, the statues, water fountains; even the street lamps look straight out of Beauty And The Beast!
Our first ride (and indeed our favourite – we rode it 3 times!) was a ‘dark ride’ called Symbolica. The ‘fantasy floats’ take you through a story exploring the King’s palace, eventually ending up in the Royal Hall where a banquet and dancing takes place. It’s a wonderfully magical ride and we all absolutely loved it!
A walk around the Fairytale Forest will lead you through all sorts of tales. We found Tom Thumb and the Giant, Pinocchio, a dragon, Hansel and Gretel, a story telling tree and more! Some of the stories we knew, others were brand new to us. You can find all of the stories on the Efteling website.
Another attraction we really enjoyed is the monorail in Laafland. You ride around in a snail above and even through the cottages! It’s a great view of this lovely fairytale village.
My kids are not big on roller coasters so we didn’t try out those. There are plenty of other attractions and dark rides though that are suitable for all the family.
Food at Efteling is really good. There’s a huge variety of restaurants and food outlets with something for everyone. Food was reasonably priced and there were plenty of healthy food options, something we struggle with at UK theme parks. We had lunch at the Kashba Restaurant. This is a self service restaurant themed around Sindbad The Sailor. There are sandwiches, snacks, salads, soups, hot meals, etc. There’s a huge amount of choice and kids meals too. The restaurant itself was beautiful and a welcome respite spot.
There are lots of characters to meet around the theme park including Pardoes, Djinn the giant and the Droomvlucht fairies.
As well as rides, Efteling has several shows that are well worth going to see. We watched Raveleijn which is a live action stunt show with real horses. It was absolutely brilliant! The show is of course in Dutch so we couldn’t understand it all but we were able to get the gist of what was going on. I don’t want to give too much away but it’s well worth going to see.
We stayed until late at night to see the Aquanura water show. This is a water fountain show with lights and music. It was the perfect ending to an incredible day at Efteling.
Efteling is probably my favourite theme park that I’ve ever visited (and I’ve visited quite a few!). I love the fairytale theme of it which runs throughout the park. Despite how huge it is the ride queues were really short. I think the longest we queued for was around 20 minutes in August. Some rides we walked straight on! The end of August is term time in The Netherlands so that’s a great time to go. The food choices were great and the staff were all so lovely too. I very highly recommend visiting if you can!
For more information, check out the Efteling website here: https://www.efteling.com/en
