Love them or hate them – theme parks have been around for hundreds of years.

The world’s oldest amusement park – Bakken in Denmark – opened in 1583, originally featuring entertainment, games and performers before evolving into a more modern theme park with rides and rollercoasters.

New theme parks and attractions are still being opened each year – with Disney’s World of Frozen opening up the gates at the newly named Disney Adventure World and the first Universal Studios park in the UK under development.

But while these parks offer a fairly standard thrill-seeking experience – what about the more unusual theme parks around the world?

Wunderland Kalkar

While lots of theme parks are, well, themed – there are very few that take inspiration from nuclear power.

Sure, there’s a Springfield Power Plant façade in the Simpsons section of Universal Studios in Hollywood, California that frequently performs a fake meltdown – but that little glimpse into Mr Burns’ business is as far as things go.

However, Wunderland Kalkar in North Rhine-Westphalia takes things a little further.

The park is on the site of a former nuclear power plant – albeit one that never went operational. SNR-300 was a costly near-20 year project that was abandoned due to safety concerns.

The site was bought up and converted into a theme park that opened in 1995 and receives around 600,000 visitors each year.

Most of the rides were built into, or around the nuclear infrastructure, including a thrilling swinging merry-go-round that takes place within the site’s 58m (190ft) tall former cooling tower - which you can also climb from the outside on a purpose built climbing wall.

Suối Tiên Cultural Theme Park

There are three Disney theme park resorts across Asia – in China, Japan and Hong Kong. Each of them leans heavily into American culture, albeit with nods to their host countries.

But Suối Tiên Cultural Theme Park in Vietnam, just outside Ho Chi Minh City takes a different approach and is unapologetically Vietnamese throughout.

The park isn’t based around castles or superheroes, but Vietnamese mythology and Buddhist symbolism.

The centrepiece of the park is a 33m tall Buddha statue as just one of hundreds of monuments of deities and sacred animals.

Visitors can walk through colourful temples on their way to rollercoasters. There’s also a crocodile zoo with over 1000 of the reptiles available to feed as well as an eco-friendly water park.

Salina Turda

While the odd rollercoaster or ride might take you underground, what about a whole theme park?

Salina Turda in Romania is 120m (394ft) underground in a former salt mine. It was first excavated in the Roman era and now plays host to a series of amusement attractions.

Once you’ve descended to the base of the mine site (it’s your choice whether to take the 172 steps down 13 floors or stick to the lift), visitors can take part in mini-golf, table tennis, bowling or even ride a subterranean Ferris wheel.

There’s also the chance for a classic theme park boat ride – but unlike attractions like Disney’s it’s a small world, guests need to put the effort in themselves, rowing across an inky-black underground lake beneath stalactite formations above.

Shijingshan Amusement Park

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery – well, executives at Disney should feel extremely flattered by this Chinese theme park.

Shijingshan Amusement Park in Beijing opened in the 1980s, but it wasn’t until 2007 that the wider world became aware of its attractions – which looked more than a little inspired by the House of Mouse.

The park featured a centralised castle, built in the style and appearance of the Californian Disneyland’s Sleeping Beauty Castle. It also featured an entrance walkway not too dissimilar to the shops and street known as Main Street, USA in Disney’s parks.

Dodgy versions of classic Disney characters like Mickey and Minnie would roam the park. The rides also seemed to pay tribute to Disney theme parks with versions of Splash Mountain and Indiana Jones themed rides.

They even built a geodesic dome in the style of the iconic symbol of Florida’s EPCOT park. Just to really hammer home the similarities, they advertised themselves with the slogan “Disney is too far to go, please come to Shijingshan”.

Shijingshan officials insisted the similarities were just coincidence. While no legal action was ever taken by Disney, the park’s management toned down some but not all of the similarities – the castle, for example, is very much still standing. Disney later opened their first Chinese theme park in Shanghai just a few years later in 2016.

This article was published in March 2026