Park Profile
www.parkworld-online.com
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The latest
attraction for 2017 is the reinvention of one of the most loved rides in the park, a dual-tracked roller coaster produced by Preston & Barberi. Master Thai has been reinvented with the use of VR and now takes guests on a journey through the jungle.
It hasn’t always been smooth sailing for the park though, having almost faced bankruptcy in 1997 and struggling to attract the predicted visitor numbers, the park certainly has a colourful history.
History The park was officially opened in 1992, and took a different approach to many of the other amusement parks that were opening at the time – which were solely aimed at children. Mirabilandia was designed to meet the expectations of families and a teen audience, as well as the many tourists that flocked to the Riviera Romagnola area every summer. Investors had originally predicted visitor numbers reaching as high as two million per year, unfortunately the park never managed to reach one million guests within the first few years of trading. The attractions on offer at the park were limited, although there were some unique rides including Sierra Tonante, a wooden rollercoaster and Rio Bravo, a water rapids ride.
The lack of investment in the park led guest numbers to dwindle even further and in 1997 the park faced closure. However new life was breathed in to the park when it was acquired by two businessmen, Gottlieb Loeffelhardt (the previous owner of Phantasialand in Germany) and Giancarlo Casoli (a businessman with previous amusement park experience).
Under this new ownership Mirabilandia was subject to a
huge investment plan that saw some of the parks most loved attractions arrive. These included the two Columbia and Discovery towers, (now called the Oil Towers after the recent western re-theming), the Eurowheel which was the highest panoramic wheel in Europe, Niagara (now El Dorado Falls) which was the first ‘shoot-the-chutes’ attraction to be installed in Italy and still the highest in Europe, and the inverted coaster Katun. Among the several new attractions that the park received
at this time, arguably the most successful was the renowned stunt show that the park has now become famous for, with an audience of over 20 million people over the past 20 years. The show is now performed in collaboration with Hot Wheels, where drivers launch their vehicles on a loop track of 65 metres long, 8 metres wide and up to 15 metres high. It is the tallest ‘wheel of death’ to ever be performed in a theme park performance. While the park was now performing well it still needed to build upon their PR and marketing strategy in Italy. New ticket offers were put in to place but ultimately it was the arrival of Mirabeach, Mirabilandia’s aqua park that really saw attendance numbers increase. Parques Reunidos, a Spanish leader in the amusement park industry, noticed the significant improvement of the parks performance and acquired the park in 2006. Shortly after the park signed deals with more than 200 hotels nearby and rolled out the ‘Mirabilandia super offer’, which included accommodation and park entrance. This immediately opened the park up to a much wider market and the number of guests visiting from more than 200km away rose dramatically. This signaled the start of a new phase at Mirabilandia, which saw further investments to the park. These investments included the arrival of several new attractions including Raratonga, a splash battle ride by Preston & Barbieri, Reset, an interactive shooting dark ride and iSpeed, the first launch coaster built in Europe by Intamin. 2011 saw the arrival of Masterthai, the first racing coaster
by Preston & Barberi and Divertical, the worlds highest water coaster manufactured by Intamin. 2011 also saw Ghostville (a wagon ride) replaced by Phobia, which is the largest walk through horror house in Europe. This year it was re-themed to fit in with the new Fast West area and renamed Legends of Dead Town.
58 SEPTEMBER 2017
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