Amarante Water Park — Attraction in Amarante

In short: smooth operation and nice ride experience. I will definitely repeat.

Arriving is an adventure by itself. You are guided by Google Maps on (very) local roads and some times you have the impression that you will end up in somebody's backyard. Not the case: this is the way, trust Google, you'll get there; it is indeed in secondary roads.

Big queue for the entrance. Arrive a bit before it opens so you get the best parking spots (the first that clear at the end of the day) and avoid spending half an hour to enter. And, do buy tickets in advance.

The big rides are the most popular, but they are also the ones with more waiting time. For example the two biggest rides with floating aids are the ones that have the most waiting... but it is worth it. The "Space Hole" has most people stopped in the middle, just before "the hole" and increases waiting time; this one is not worth the wait. Then the plain open slides are quite fast to get in and is the adrenaline kick you'd expect. At the end you spend most time on these. Other than waiting queues, things go swift: there are enough personnel to take care of everything. Restaurant line didn't take five minutes, renting the sunshade and the hammock did not take long either; and exiting each ride does not get crammed because people behave and there are staff nearby to make things go smooth. If you are the type that wants most ride time and enjoys water time, do not spend your money on the sunshade and hammock, you won't use them that much. Changing rooms are clean and offer sitting space, restaurants do not get overly crowded and you will like the sun now and then to dry up your...

Can't recommend at all after a poor but expensive experience:

Bought online tickets, but the queue at opening time is huge for online tickets and not processed v quickly and those paying on the door walked straight in Massively busy - 30-40 min queues for almost all the slides. In August sun that's no fun and the 30 seconds of the (enjoyable) slide isn't worth it. Paid extra for a sun lounger but nearly all of them are close to a PA speaker blasting out loud music. Then a DJ next to the main pool starts playing another track at the same time. Some of this music contains very explicit language. As in the worst sort of swearwords in the english language. Presumably the managers want to encourage English speaking tourists with younger children? Not sure if this is naivity on the part of non-english speaking individuals choosing the music, but in a venue where there is a lot of children then this is totally unacceptable.

I would also like to highlight what happened when a wildfire in the woods up the hill meant we were evacuated :

Some of the staff did not seem to know what the agreed evacuation plan was - so one of the two big red staircases to climb up towards the exit was blocked by staff seemingly to indicate the ride at the top was closed. But that halved the ability to get people up and away quickly. Just needed staff at the top entrance to the ride to block that whilst people used those stairs.

Having paid well over 100 euros to visit (and rent loungers) but having missed out on 4 hours of the opening hours due to the fire, I've asked for a partial refund. I am yet to...

It's a nice and big place, but besides being very crowded it's organisation and maintenance are poor. It is possible to buy tickets online but there are few instruction to buy them beforehand, so when we arrived there was more than 200m of queue for normal tickets and none for online tickets. To make it worse it's not possible to buy online on the same day..(So i advise you to buy them on the previous day. You save money and "cut" what other ways would be a long queue.) Despite the above, which is not very critical the most surprising thing is that the slides are so long that one person needs to wait for long times. I guess it's for safety reasons. The ones that are good to go to are the competition and multicolored slides since they move faster. The wave pool is goo too. Another minus is that the color of the slides and swimming pools are leaving so it's very easy to have your swimming suit with color stains from the slides...

If you don't mind using 50% of the water park, waiting long times in queues or if you don't have kids then this is a good option. However, if you don't like the before mentioned things and want to have an overall better experience you should go to NaturWaterPark in Douro. Short queue lines, cheaper and has more attractions for...