PortAventura
Spain
 Park News - (6/3/2025) According to an update about the new El Diablo Neo experience coming to PortAventura, a director at the park also mentioned that PortAventura World’s Hysteria in Boothill XR attraction has also been updated. The updated Boothill attraction “features new scares and improved physical effects such as vibrations, hot air, scents and tactile elements.”
(5/29/2025) Something new is coming to PortAventura this summer. According to a teaser posted by the park, it appears that a VR or AR style add-on is coming to the park’s Diablo Mine Train roller coaster. They are calling it El Diablo Neo and as you might expect, this will be an upcharge mixed reality experience that you will have to pay extra for.
The funny thing is that this attempt almost feel like it’s about a decade too late, as it was about 10 years ago that several parks in the US, mostly Six Flags, attempted to enhanced several of their thrill rides through the addition of VR headgear, in a partnership with Samgsung I believe. The end result was that most guests did not like it, but there were a few experiences out there that did gain some notable traction at the time.
In the European market in particular, Mack-Media was able to add several of these optional add-on experiences to a number of attractions at Europa-Park, many of which are still being offered. In fact, a Phantom of the Opera experience was added to the park’s Eurosat Coastiality experience just last year to great fan-fair… so perhaps PortAventura may be on to something with this latest addition. If anyone gets to experience this, let me know what you think!
UPDATE - I’m told that this is actually not VR or AR... but rather something called MR... Mixed Reality. The concept is similar to AR except the added graphics are not just overlaid over the real world images, but they are intelligent enough to interact with the reality you are seeing. For example, a serpent could weave in and out of a set of support collumns, rather than just floating over them. Coaster101 has a great explanation of this all.
(4/3/2025) A little bad news if you were planning a visit to PortAventura in the near future. According to this news article the park staff have announced that they will go on strike on April 19th, in time with the busy Easter Holiday weekend, after they have been unable to renew their work agreement with the park’s owners that actually expired back on Dec. 31st, 2024.
The worker’s union are asking for decent salary increases, mentioning that currently 65% of the staff are only paid minimum wage.
2025 - Nothing is known at this time...
PortAventura May Be For Sale - (9/17/2023) According to a few news articles from Spain, the two investment companies behind the PortAventura theme park resort (KKR and Investindustrial) are now looking to sell off the popular attraction. According to the article the sale of the PortAventura resort could generate a price around 1 billion Euros. PortAventura has had a long history of shared ownership, starting off as a shared attraction between the Tussauds Group (40.01%), La Caixa (33.19%) and Anheuser-Busch (19.9%) and FECSA (6.7%) when it first opened in 1995. In 1998 the Tussauds group sold their shares to Universal, and the attraction was rebranded for a time as Universal’s Port Aventura, and adopted Woody Woodpecker as the official mascot.
Over the years the park’s group ownership has essentially be a non-stop revolving door of owners, with Anheuser-Busch and Universal having dropped out long ago. Through a series of mergers and buy-outs it sounds like the park has narrowed the ownership down to just two investment companies: Investindustrial (50.1%) and KKR (49.9%), both of which appear to be in agreement that the time is right to sell the attraction now that it is turning a profit and expected to end the 2023 season with higher attendance than it had in 2019 (5.2 million). To these efforts the groups are already working with JP Morgan to work out the details of a possible sale.
So the real question is who might be interested in the opportunity to buy the entire property once and for all? The site itself is home to several hotels, a waterpark, the PortAventura theme park as well as a second gate micro-park experience, Ferrari Land. Disney had their chance once with this property, as the site was actually in the running in the 90’s to become home to “EuroDisney” before the Paris location won out.
Universal comes to mind as a possible bidder, as they once had parietal ownership and managed the park for many years under the eyes of a previous owner of Universal. Comcast is calling the shots these days, and they’ve been very gung-ho with investing in the Universal parks brand, having finalized buyout to completely own the Universal park in Japan, build a brand new park in China, and are currently building a 3rd major theme park in Florida. Being able to take advantage of the option for a 100% buyout of PortAventura for complete control of the resort, and the bragging rights for being able to plant the Universal flag firmly in Europe once and for all may be a temptation Comcast just won't be able to resist.
Keep in mind that cash may not be an issue for Comcast either, as Comcast still owns 33% of HULU and under the 2019 agreement where Disney absorbed FOX’s 33% to mix with their own 33% ownership, Comcast was said to be able to trigger a buyout offer from Disney as early as January 2024 for a minimum of $27.5 billion. However a press release from Comcast on Sept. 6th mentions that Comcast and Disney have agreed to moved up the date for the HULU deal to Sept. 30th, and that they expect to settle for more than the minimum price as the value of HULU has “increased dramatically” since that 2019 agreement was drafted. So with Comcast soon to be flush with cash, the chance to add PortAventura to their attractions portfolio is something of a no-brainer in my opinion.
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