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Parque Europa Baku

Corralejo’s abandoned theme park

By Georgios Vasilopoulos

April 3^rd, 2022

On the edge of Corralejo, on the north coast of Fuerteventura, lies an abandoned theme park, previously known as Parque Europa Baku. Once home to an animal park—featuring seals, snakes, lizards, turtles, racoons, donkeys, birds and a shark tank—a haunted hotel, a bingo hall, a bowling alley, several botanical gardens and performance areas, a Chicago-style diner… even a life-sized galleon modelled after Christopher Columbus’s largest ship, La Santa María, its attractions have been decaying under a veneer of desert dust and graffiti since the late 2000s.

Minimal effort has been made to keep out urban explorers or, indeed, vandals—the area is surrounded by a chainlink fence with holes cut through and sections missing, and the authorities seem to turn a blind eye to the area.

Wandering around, I tried to imagine how the park looked in its day, with its palm-lined paths and cactus gardens, and it was quite heartbreaking to see the work of so many people—architects, builders, artisans, landscape designers, horticulturalists, zoologists—just left to rot away.

In the last decade or so, anything worth taking has been stolen, numerous structures—including the galleon, in May 2019—set alight by arsonists, others graffitied by vandals, and the gardens left to wither, unwatered and unloved.

I struggled to find much detail about the theme park—searches resulted in a couple of videos and a handful of discussions on expat message boards. It seems Parque Europa Baku was controversial even at its height, with neighbours lamenting noise from concerts and the park, itself, operating at a time when animal parks had long gone out of fashion. I feel like, today, it wants be forgotten—by the city, by the then-owners and by local residents alike.

Next door, a water park—once part of Baku—remains open seasonally, its name now changed to Acua Water Park, presumably in an effort to rebrand and distance itself from the failed theme park.

It would be wrong to recommend that anyone visiting Corralejo take time out to tour this site—many of the remains are very obviously not structurally sound and, with so much debris lying around, it wouldn’t be difficult to injure oneself—however, it is theoretically possible, and a stark reminder of the immense waste humans are capable of leaving behind when the cashflow stops.