Theme Parks of Valencia

Entertaining parks and aquaparks can be called “visit cards” of Valencia. The best one and the most famous of all is certainly Terra Mitica. It was opened in 2000 and is a great complex of side-shows for children and their parents. This place can be considered to be not even a “visit card” of Valencia but its great advertising company.

The name Terra Mitica is translated into English as “the Earth of Myths”. The park was built near Benidorm, so now Benidorm is known as the best place for holidays. It is the resort number 1! Terra Mitica can’t be compared with any park of the world. The park combines entertainments and the so-called cognitive tourism. The general idea of the park concerns ancient civilizations of the Mediterranean coast. Each ancient civilization has got a special zone in Terra Mitica park. There is a zone of Egypt, a zone of Iberia (Spain and Portugal), the zone of Greece, the zone of Rome and the zone of the Islands.

It is difficult, of course, to speak about educational effect of Terra Mitica. When people entertain themselves at the Waterfalls of the Nile (it is an attraction in a swimming-pool with overfalls more than 20 meters) or at the Sincop (it is a gigantic lift which raises tourists 35 meters high and the speed of which is 90 km per hour), they scarcely think of the history of the Mediterranean sea and coast. And these attractions are only one tenth of all entertaining places which they can visit there.

Anyway, more than 1 mln tourists visited Terra Mitica in 2000. Terra Mitica is not the only park in the vicinity of Benidorm. There are three more entertaining centres there: Aqualandia, Mundomar and Terra Natura. Aqualandia is considered the greatest aquapark in Costa Blanca.

Besides aquaparks Costa Blanca can offer you to spend time in the open air in safari parks. The most famous safari parks are El Verger, Safari Aitana and Rio Safari in Elche.

The tourists can spend holidays and entertain themselves and their children not only in Costa Blanca but in Costa Azahar as well. There is a great aquapark called Aquarama there. It is situated near Benicasim in the province of Castellon. The total area of the park is about 45000 square kms. The territory is great but the quantity of entertaining side-shows, swimming-pools and attractions is even greater.

Besides Aquarama there is one more famous park in the province of Castellon which is called Castelló Cultural. There is the Theatre of Prinispal, the Area of Modern Arts, the Museum of Fine Arts in Castellon de la Plana and the Conference Centres of Castellon and Peniscola there. Castello Cultural regularly organizes different kinds of exhibitions and festivals.

But on the other hand if we compare all these places of interest with the sights of the capital of Valencia we may say that the capital is even more interesting to visit. Firstly, it is because of the City of Science and Art which is often called “the Excursion to the Future”. There are three buildings there which have no analogies in Spain. They are the Oceanarium, the Planetarium and the Museum of Science. The Oceanarium strikes your impression not only because of a great variety of birds, fish and animals of the ocean, but because of its great architecture. The Museum of Science is a unique complex where the exposition is like a great experiment and the visitors are the experimenters. The planetarium is situated in a complex called Hemispheric which was built in the form of an eye. The tourists can travel round the Earth there and they are offered to visit a super modern Cinema Hall Imax Done to watch a laser show. The price for a ticket to visit these three buildings is a little bit more than 23 Eur.