Gardaland Site Features

The roller coasters

The park's headline rides, several of them significant by European standards, are what draws teenagers and adults rather than only small children.

The themed areas

Fantasy, adventure and film-styled zones, laid out in the standard theme-park manner.

Sea Life

An aquarium on the same site, sold separately or in combination.

The seasonal openings

Halloween and Christmas are heavily programmed and are among the busiest times of the year -- a deliberate extension of the shore's season.

Gardaland sits at Castelnuovo del Garda, about two kilometres inland from the lake and roughly ten minutes from Peschiera, on the low morainic hills at the southern end of the basin.

That ground is glacial debris -- the ridges the ice left when it retreated and the lake filled behind them -- and it is the same terrain the Bardolino vineyards grow on a little further north.

The site was farmland before 1975, and being off the shore is why a park of this size could be built at all: the lakefront itself was already developed, and there was no room on it.

Its position also explains the traffic. The park draws from the whole southern basin and funnels it onto the same roads that serve Peschiera and Lazise, which is why the southern shore is congested in a way the northern one is not.