Foreign Perspectives

You kind of expect parks aimed at kids to be child-safe, don’t you?

Port Aventura is aimed mainly at children from around 7 or 8 up as most rides are limited to those 1.2m or taller (it charges full-price from age 4 but I’ve yet to see a 4 year old that clears 1.2m) but does have a number of small playground areas for fairly young children.

We went right through the Polynesian area of Port Aventura without finding a ride suitable for our 4 year old so he was very keen to get into the playground in the Chinese area of the park when we reached it.

Within about ten minutes, he’d fallen on one of the slides. Well, several by then as that’s what kids do. However, the final one he fell on turned out to be a very rusty metal one with lots of jagged pieces of metal sticking up and so he cut his eyelid quite badly.

We were very surprised to see how poor the maintenance was and would have expected that particular slide to have been replaced long ago. Additionally, whilst we were expecting the park staff in the area to make a point of assisting us with a child with a potentially quite serious eye injury, we were just vaguely directed to the medical centre. It also set us wondering if the rides are similarly poorly maintained and just awaiting a major accident to have that discovered.

To some extent, the excellent Port Aventura medical centre suggests to me that the number of accidents caused by various aspects of the park are fairly significant and that the park isn’t nearly as safe as it should be.

So, do be careful in Port Aventura with your kids even in the “safe” areas for infants because they aren’t as safe as they should be.

One Response to “Port Aventura: poorly maintained and not safe for children”