At 11am on this beautiful summer day, car parks as large as those at two airports surrounding the Efteling are full. The crowds are already pouring into the gigantic entrance hall, a wooden spire bristling with four slender towers and topped by a thatched roof, where smiling staff in blue uniforms, orange ties or scarves await. We are in the Netherlands, where the house of Orange-Nassau reigns.

This squad greets the visitor in all languages ​​and directs him to this beautiful amusement park where the public has long since rediscovered its childlike spirit and surrendered, without asking any questions, to the poetry of the stories: White snow, Sleeping Beauty, Hansel and Gretel, etc. In the original version, not corrected in accordance with current events and the fight against stereotypes that they are sometimes accused of transmitting.

“Fairy” and “Charming” are the two most common qualifiers to describe this 65-hectare site, which opened in 1952. For most visitors finding themselves in this region of the southern Netherlands, between Breda and Tilburg, that’s the best way to say it with its lakes, canals where exotic fish swim, five “kingdoms,” old-time attractions, and delightfully quaint little museum.

Don’t lose visitors

Efteling is a world of princesses in pink dresses, folk songs, Moorish architecture and pagodas, leisurely sailing gondolets and rolling shell-shaped carriages. Even the black eyes of the mythical giant raptor, “strong as a hundred lions”, hovering over Vogel Rok (“the rock bird”), a rollercoaster ride in the dark, it seems to scare no one.

Issues related to the evolution of the world and Dutch society, as a result of the Black Lives Matter movement (“black lives matter”) or the controversy over Zwarte Piet, the black servant of Saint Nicholas, nevertheless crossed the doors of the domain a few years ago. and trained “settings”linked both to the image that the park management wants to offer and to the need not to lose visitors.

Efteling, originally a sports complex and recreation area, is first and foremost a thriving business. With its 5.4 million annual visitors (80% Dutch, 20% foreign) and its 3,000 employees, it has gone from a paternalistic Christian-inspired project to the status of a very profitable company: 266 million in turnover in 2022, a net profit of 34 million euros for its sole shareholder, the Efteling Nature Park Foundation.

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