Gardaland

About this place

Around three million people a year come through the gates of a theme park on the southern shore of Lake Garda, barely thirty kilometres west of Verona — enough to make Gardaland comfortably the most visited park in Italy and one of the ten most visited in Europe. It opened on 19 July 1975, when the country had nothing of the sort, and has belonged since 2006 to Britain's Merlin Entertainments, the group behind Legoland and SEA LIFE, which brought international standards to its design, its upkeep and its three on-site hotels. Inside are roughly forty attractions spread across carefully themed lands, seven of them roller coasters: the suspended Blue Tornado, the winged Raptor, Oblivion with its vertical plunge, and the mine-train Mammut, alongside the Jumanji dark ride, the Legoland Water Park and the SEA LIFE aquarium — the last two each ticketed separately on top of park admission. A new boat ride through twenty indoor scenes, Animal Treasure Island, opened in April 2025 for the park's fiftieth anniversary. Be clear-eyed about it: if you are chasing the continent's biggest coasters, they are in Germany, not here. Gardaland's real strength is breadth — it keeps an entire family busy, the youngest children first of all. The single most important thing to know before planning anything is that the park is entirely seasonal. It runs daily from late March to 1 November — the Halloween season falls inside that stretch and is among its busiest — and then shuts. It comes back only for Magic Winter, roughly 5 December to 6 January, on selected days rather than every day, before closing completely until the following spring. Visiting Verona in February simply means Gardaland is off the table; there is nothing to see at a locked gate. Even on the winter days that do open, some rides stand idle and the water park is closed. Gates open at 10:00, with closing between 17:00 and 18:00 in spring and autumn and as late as 23:00 at the height of summer. Getting there is easier than most people expect and needs no car: a train from Verona Porta Nuova reaches Peschiera del Garda in about fifteen minutes, and a free shuttle leaves from outside the station every half hour, covering the two kilometres to the gate in minutes — running from thirty minutes before opening to thirty minutes after closing. There is no single ticket price: an adult pays EUR 59 at the gate, while online for a fixed date starts around EUR 44 and early-booking promotions fall to about EUR 32, which makes the ticket window the most expensive way in. Children under 90 cm enter free. Note that the three big thrill coasters — Blue Tornado, Raptor and Oblivion — set a minimum height of 1.40 m, though the Mammut mine train takes children from 1.10 m, so a family with small children will spend most of the day in the gentler lands rather than on the rails. The food is uniformly Italian park fare — pizza, pasta, sandwiches — with no guarantee of halal meat, so vegetarian dishes and fish are the safe route, and the park advertises no dedicated prayer room, which is worth planning around. Gardaland is not covered by the Verona Card.