Of course, the weather is absolutely unsuitable for opening a theme park: it’s cold, it’s raining, it’s stormy. Little Joni doesn’t want to let the fun be spoiled: “Can I dig,” he asks his mom and wants to run off to the pile of sand, buckets and shovels next to the attraction “Grandpa Kläff’s Pirate Ship Ride”. His mother just holds him back: “This is not the day to dig in the sand.”
Maybe it’s the day to jump in mud? Because of course that’s exactly what Peppa Pig would do. The cartoon character, who is particularly popular with kindergarten and preschool children, loves nothing more than wallowing in the mud together with his brother Schorsch. Of course, visitors can be a bit of a pig here too, in the mud puddle playground with four water slides, water games and a large water bucket. In this respect, the rain is quite fitting for the opening of the first Peppa Pig Park in Europe, located right next to and part of Legoland there.
There is already a Peppa Pig amusement park in Florida, but due to complicated copyright laws, the park is also called that in Germany, although Peppa behind the big rainbow as the entrance portal, i.e. within the park, is already called Pig, as German children know her. It is actually great news for Günzburg and the region that the second fun park of this kind is not coming to Asia, not to a large metropolis, but to Bavarian-Swabian. The model is extremely successful in Florida; it will also attract large numbers of guests to Günzburg, like the Legoland Park, which has existed since 2002 and which put Günzburg on the tourist map in the first place.
Including the parking space, the park is a manageable 2.2 hectares in size. The Günzburg Legoland boss Manuela Stone calls the construction an “incredible high-speed project”: Planning began in October 2022, construction work did not start until mid-2023. The Merlin Entertainments Group behind it invested 30 million euros. There are now seven themed playgrounds and five rides, all based on the Peppa Pig stories from books and television. Children can climb and slide in Peppa’s tree house and dig with Grandpa Kläff, provided the weather is good and mothers allow it. And next to the mud puddle playground there is an area where the target group of three to six year olds can recreate Peppa’s adventures or invent their own stories using Lego and Duplo bricks.
The rides such as the Papa Pig roller coaster, the Grandpa Pig dinosaur adventure or Peppa’s balloon ride – also suitable for wheelchair users – are designed to be age-appropriate, including when it comes to shading in summer: no one has to worry about the little visitors getting sunburnt or are overwhelmed, the roller coaster takes a short lap with gentle curves. “Mr. Bulles Hau-den-Lukas” is a tower in whose seats children ride up five meters and then quickly fall back down again in an age-appropriate manner. Shows take place on a stage four times a day, but Peppa and her family also appear as fabric figures in the park. The planners even recreated Peppa’s house, ten meters high and, according to the original, on a green hill.
From Sunday onwards the first visitors are allowed into the park, Friday and Saturday only invited guests. The first visitors are kindergarten children from the region, who didn’t let the rain stop them. They mumble “cool,” “great,” and “great” into the microphones that reporters from TV and radio stations hold in front of their faces; that has to be enough as an initial assessment. “Peppa is a pink phenomenon,” says park manager Stone, referring to the very healthy skin color of the cartoon pigs that were invented 20 years ago.
The city and district of Günzburg also want to take advantage of this phenomenon. Before Legoland was established, tourism numbers were negligible, but Günzburg recently reported another record: more than 600,000 overnight stays in 2023 in the city alone, almost a million in the district. District Administrator Hans Reichhart (CSU) recently described the importance of the now double amusement park with Peppa Pig as a rise “from zero to a hundred”, a development from “nobody to a great tourist region” – a region that can keep up with the holiday destinations in the Allgäu, Compared to which the northern districts of Swabia usually lose out when it comes to the number of visitors.