I can’t even begin to express my level of disappointment with this place. Avoid it! Don’t go! I’ve been wanting to visit for years and I was so excited, but upon arriving I could instantly see that my vision was nothing like the sad reality of today. The site has been ruined by commercialization and poor management. Long gone are the days of stumbling upon the gardens and wandering at a leisurely pace through the sculptures and swimming in the pools. The road outside the gardens is absolutely clogged with traffic and vendors. After fighting through, we paid to park in a precarious spot and were immediately accosted by touts telling us we needed to go back to town to buy tickets (we had purchased online a few weeks ago — for some reason you cannot buy tickets on site). We waited an hour in the heat for our timed entry but upon passing through the gates were shunted into another line to pay for a guide. Note that English-speaking guides cost twice as much as Spanish-speaking guides, if a tour in English is important to you. I expressed my surprise at having to pay again, having already paid online and was actually reprimanded for not reading the fine print about the guide fee when buying the ticket weeks ago. Why not just include the price of the mandatory guide in the ticket price? Why make things as difficult as possible if not to discourage visitors, which seems to be the idea? By this point my son was feeling overheated and unwell after a long day of travel so I asked if we could go in for just a few minutes to look around. I did not think we could handle a 90-minute lockstep tour in a crowd of people. We were told that the gardens are private property and that people cannot be unattended by a guide for even one moment. I understand the need to protect the sculptures. And I certainly cannot blame local people one bit for trying to make a living from this folly that Edward James, with the benefit of his millions of dollars, conjured up in the middle of their quiet village. But the overall effect is just terrible and sad. In the end we walked away without going in and I will probably never visit.