You climb a four-storey staircase in flip-flops, nudging up the steps with around forty other people in damp swimsuits, and at the top a Thai-temple-themed gantry crew member buckles you into a near-vertical drop slide. Then you cross your arms, brace your feet against the door, and the floor opens. Twenty-eight metres later, you are travelling fast enough that the transparent tube around you blurs, and a shark cruises past your shoulder on the other side of the acrylic.
That is the Tower of Power. It is the signature ride at Siam Park, and it is the moment that explains why this place has held the TripAdvisor World’s Best Water Park title 10 times in a row. Most of the planet’s water parks build a slide. Siam Park builds a sequence of them through a stage set.
Siam Park sits on a hillside above Costa Adeje on the south-west coast of Tenerife. It opened in 2008. It is, as far as I’m concerned, the only water park I’d happily fly to a country for. That sounds like marketing copy. It isn’t. The whole island has a long history of theme-park development (Loro Parque a few towns east opened in 1972, the new generation of attractions clusters around Adeje), but Siam Park is the one that genuinely earns the day.
In a Hurry? The Three Tickets That Matter
- Standard Entry ($52): the cheapest way in, no extras. Book Siam Park entry
- Loro Parque + Siam Park Combined ($92): best value if you’re doing both, valid across two non-consecutive days. Book the combo
- All-Inclusive ($194): fast-track plus lunch, drinks, towels, and lockers. Worth it in July and August when queues hit 90 minutes. Book all-inclusive
Why Siam Park Is Worth a Full Day, Not Half
Most travellers underestimate this park. They book it as a half-day filler between a beach morning and a buffet dinner, then realise around 2pm that they’ve only seen a third of the rides. Siam Park has 14 major attractions plus a wave pool, a kids’ area called Sawasdee, a 700-metre artificial beach, surfing lessons in the Wave Palace, a floating market, and enough Thai-themed pavilions, dragon statues, and golden pagodas that you keep finding new corners. Plan for opening to closing. The same all-day rule applies to Loro Parque a few towns east, which is why most travellers do the parks on different days rather than half-and-half.
The cost is real. A standard adult ticket runs $52 at the gate, which is roughly seventy per cent more than you’d pay at a standard mainland Spanish water park, and food inside is priced like an airport. But it earns the price. The water is heated to 25°C year-round (the designer Christoph Kiessling calls it “the first air-conditioned outdoor aquatic park in the world”), the desalination plant on site cleans 700 cubic metres of seawater a day for the rides, and the engineering on the bigger slides is built by ProSlide, the Canadian firm that builds the genuine destination water parks worldwide. You can feel the difference. The funnels are wider, the bowls turn faster, the freefall on Tower of Power actually feels like a freefall.
If you’ve already done a few of Tenerife’s other big-ticket attractions, this one slots in as the obvious midpoint of an island week. A morning at Siam Park, a chilled-out afternoon back at your hotel, and the next day on something completely different: a whale-watching cruise from Los Cristianos or the long climb up to Mount Teide for sunset and stargazing. The variety is what makes Tenerife a destination instead of just a sun-lounger week.
The Rides, Ranked by What’s Worth Queueing For
Most Siam Park lists rank by speed or height. I rank by what’s worth queueing for and what to skip if the lines are bad.
The Tower of Power (the one ride to do)
It’s a 28-metre near-vertical ProSlide Freefall. Climbed: about three minutes if it’s the first thing you do in the morning, much longer later. The drop itself takes about three seconds. You stand inside the door at the top, the floor releases, and you’re at the bottom before you’ve finished the breath you took before the drop. The trick is the section near the bottom: the slide passes through a transparent acrylic tube that runs through the shark tank, so for the last second of the ride you’re surrounded by sharks, rays, and tropical fish. You won’t see them well at speed. You’ll know they’re there.
This ride alone justifies a full park day in my book. Do it twice if the line lets you, once for the drop and once to actually look. Riders need to be at least 1.4m tall and the height limit is enforced; lighter visitors sometimes get bounced off the wall on the way down, so brace.
The Singha (the underrated one)
Singha is what Siam Park markets as a “rollercoaster water slide”. It’s a hybrid ProSlide RocketBlast + FlyingSaucer 45, opened in 2015 in partnership with the Thai beer brand of the same name. High-speed water jets push your raft uphill, then you drop through a series of saucer features. It tops out at about 18 metres per second. The whole ride lasts longer than Tower of Power and is more fun ride-wise; it just lacks the singular drop-moment that makes Tower iconic.
If you only have one slow line in you for the day and you’ve already done the Tower, queue Singha next.
Mai Thai River (the world’s longest lazy river)
This is the world’s longest lazy river. It stretches 1,070 metres and runs at the highest elevation of any lazy river anywhere, eight metres above the park floor at its peak. You float through Thai-temple settings, past artificial waterfalls, under bridges, and at the end you have a choice: float out into the lagoon or get diverted up a lift onto a final slide that drops you past more sharks. Most riders take the standard exit. Take the slide. It’s the better ending.
Mai Thai is also the right ride to do twice across the day. Once mid-morning to scout the park (you’ll see most of the major slides from the river), and once late afternoon when your legs are gone. If lazy-water rivers are your thing, the closest Mediterranean equivalents on this site are the glass tunnels at the Genoa Aquarium or the canal floats at the Barcelona Aquarium, but neither of those involves swimsuits.
The Wave Palace (highest waves of any wave pool)
The Wave Palace is built around a Murphys Waves Ltd wave machine from Scotland. The waves come up to 3.3 metres high, the highest of any wave pool on earth. There’s an artificial white-sand beach where most people lie, and a surfing school runs lessons in the actual wave for kids and beginners. The catch: at peak times the pool gets uncomfortably crowded, and the strongest wave sets aren’t continuous. Watch the schedule posted near the lifeguard station, time your swim, and don’t wade out without a wristband. If you want real waves on real water afterwards, a whale-watching cruise from Los Cristianos is twenty minutes south of here.
Vulcano, the Dragon, Kinnaree, and Saifá (the bowls and funnels)
These are the four big “thrill” rides that aren’t Tower of Power or Singha. Vulcano is a four-person bowl with a laser show inside; the Dragon throws four people down a 20-metre funnel under a giant dragon model; Kinnaree (a two-stage tornado that opened in 2012) is the smoothest of the bowl rides; Saifá (the dual-lane race coaster, new in 2023) is what you do if you’ve got two competitive friends.
If you have a strong stomach, do all four. If you’re a bowl-ride sceptic, the Dragon is the one to commit to. The closest mainland-Spain analogue for that gut-shot drop sensation isn’t another water park; it’s the boardwalk vertigo on the Caminito del Rey above El Chorro. The closest French adrenaline parallel for the same kind of single-day water-and-cliff hit is a Verdon Gorge trip out of Nice, which puts you on turquoise water at the foot of 700-metre limestone walls instead of in a four-person bowl, but the gut-flip register is similar.
Jungle Snakes (skip if the line is over 30 minutes)
Four ProSlide PipeLine slides named after snakes: Cobra, Boa, Viper, Python. Two are standard, two are turbo. They’re decent fun in themselves but they’re not the rides you remember from a Siam Park day. If the line is shorter than half an hour, ride them; if not, walk past.
Naga Racer (the family pick)
A six-lane mat racer. You go down head-first on a mat, and the lanes are timed so it’s a real race. Kids love it because the line moves quickly. Adults do too because it’s the one slide where group bragging rights are at stake.
Mekong Rapids and Patong Rapids (best with four)
Both are family raft rides. Mekong is the older one; Patong opened in 2018 and is the world’s first version of a Mammoth slide that empties into a double FlyingSaucer feature. Both seat four. They’re the right thing to ride when you’ve got a mixed-age group and you want everyone in the same boat. Do one, not both.
Lost City (skip unless you’ve got under-tens)
Lost City is a children’s play structure with 120 mini games. If you’ve got young kids, they’ll lose an hour in here happily. The same energy lives at the Upside Down Museum in Amsterdam, where rooms flipped on their ceilings give younger visitors the same hour-of-genuine-fun-for-parents-to-step-back. If you don’t, walk past.
The Park Itself, as a Place
The thing that lifts Siam Park above other water parks isn’t the slides. It’s the theming. The whole park is built on a hillside, which means the slides follow the natural terrain rather than being held up on visible scaffolding. You walk between rides on Thai-temple paths, past floating-market boats, around dragon-statue pools, and the only park-furniture giveaway is the lifeguard towers.
Kiessling, who designed the park, asked the Thai royal family for permission to use the name “Siam” (the historical name for Thailand). They agreed on one condition: he wouldn’t copy royal palaces, temples, or statues of Buddha directly. So everything you see is a Thai-influenced design rather than a copy of any specific Thai building. This is why the architecture feels coherent rather than Disney-pastiche; nobody’s trying to recreate Wat Pho. They’re building in a Thai vocabulary. The closest comparison on the rest of this site is the way the Santa Maria abbey on Montserrat sits inside its mountain landscape rather than imposing itself on it.
The other thing the hillside gives you is sightlines. From halfway up the park you can see most of the major slides at once and roughly half of Costa Adeje below: the resort hotels, the harbour, the volcanic coast. On a clear day the silhouette of Mount Teide rises behind everything to the north. Take five minutes at one of the hilltop pavilions before you start queueing.
How the Tickets Work
There are five ticket products to know about, and the difference between them comes down to fast-track access, food, and whether you’re combining with Loro Parque next door.
Standard entry ($52) is what most people buy. It includes everything in the park (all rides, the wave pool, the kids’ area), but no food, no drinks, no fast-track, and no towel. You can buy lockers at €10 to €15 a day. Bring your own towel from your hotel. The 70% premium over a standard mainland water park sits in the same range as the gap between booking the Valencia Oceanogràfic versus a regional aquarium: it’s real, it’s a lot, and it’s the price of doing it properly.
The combined Loro Parque + Siam Park ticket ($92) is the move if you’re going to do both parks. It’s about $20 cheaper than buying them separately, and the ticket is valid across two non-consecutive days, which is the killer feature: you do Siam Park one day, take a rest day, then hit Loro Parque the day after. It’s the same logic as the day-trip combo passes that get sold for the Italian state museums, where you’d grab a pass like the Pitti Palace and Boboli Gardens combined entry rather than two separate doors. Loro Parque is the other big Tenerife attraction, the marine and parrot park up the coast in Puerto de la Cruz, and the combo is genuinely the best way to do them both unless you’re hard-set on one only.
The all-inclusive entry ($194) is the most-expensive option and the one most people skip looking at. It’s worth a second look in summer. It buys you fast-track on the major rides, lunch and unlimited soft drinks, towels, lockers at two locations across the park, and you don’t have to queue at all to get in. In July and August, when the headline lines stretch to 90 minutes, that’s not a luxury, it’s the difference between riding everything and riding two slides.
Combined ticket with hotel transport ($115) is the option if you’re staying in Los Cristianos or Las Americas without a rental car. The shuttle picks you up at the hotel, drops you at the park, and gets you back. Worth it if you’d otherwise be paying €30 each way in taxis.
Annual pass exists at the gate for around €115 and pays for itself on the second visit. Worth it if you’re staying in Tenerife for more than a week and have older kids.
Best Tickets Right Now
1. Siam Park Entry Tickets: $52
This is the right pick if you’re price-conscious or visiting in a quieter month (October through April typically), where the wait times don’t justify paying for fast-track. Our review of the standard entry option covers what’s actually included and the food-pricing trap to watch for. Buy online rather than at the gate, both for the small price reduction and to skip the entry queue.
2. Loro Parque + Siam Park Combined Ticket: $92
This is the right pick if you’re spending more than three nights on Tenerife. The math gets it right: roughly $20 cheaper than buying both gates separately, and the two-day flexibility means you can rest between parks. Our combined ticket review walks through the bus transfer between the two parks if you don’t have a hire car, and our Loro Parque guide covers what’s worth doing on the partner-park day.
3. Siam Park All-Inclusive Entry Ticket: $194
This is the right pick if you’re going in July or August, when the fast-track alone justifies the price-jump on the busiest days and you save the in-park food premium on top. Our all-inclusive review breaks down whether the included menu options are actually decent or just the price-of-admission lunch you’d grudgingly buy anyway. Skip this in low season; standard entry is enough.
Timing the Day
The park opens at 10am most of the year, 5pm closing in winter and 6pm closing in summer. Get there for opening. You’ll have the first hour with no queues, which is exactly when you should bank the rides that turn into 90-minute waits later (Tower of Power, Singha, Vulcano, the Dragon).
Here’s the order I’d run:
10:00–11:30, bank the headliners. Tower of Power first (because the line builds first), then Singha, then either Vulcano or the Dragon. Don’t waste the empty-park hour on slides that never have queues. The lazy river and the bowls without funnels are still walk-on at 2pm.
11:30–13:30, float and lunch. Hit Mai Thai River for the scout-the-park float, then take an early lunch around 12:30 to beat the lunch queue. The on-park food is overpriced (a basic burger and chips is around €15, a beer €7) but the buffet at Beach Club Restaurant is the best of the on-site options. If you brought sandwiches, the picnic tables near the entrance are the move.
13:30–15:30, afternoon thrills. By now lines on the headline rides are 60-plus minutes, so this is the time for the Wave Palace, Naga Racer, Mekong/Patong Rapids, the Jungle Snakes if they’re under 30 minutes, and a second go on Tower of Power if you’re willing to commit to the queue. Watch the wave-pool schedule for the high-wave sets.
15:30–17:00, second lazy river and slow exit. This is when most parents-with-kids head to the Sawasdee kids’ area, and when the rest of us re-ride Mai Thai. The light gets warm in the late afternoon and the photos from the river bridges are the best of the day. By 16:30 the headline-ride lines start dropping again as families leave; if you held back from Tower-of-Power round two, this is the window.
Getting There from the Resort Towns
Siam Park is on the south-west coast of Tenerife, just inland from Costa Adeje. The location matters because it’s a 15-minute drive from most of the big resort towns where holidaymakers stay (Costa Adeje, Las Americas, Los Cristianos, Fañabé), but it’s an hour and a quarter by road from the northern resorts (Puerto de la Cruz, Garachico). If you’re staying in the north, plan for a long drive or skip Siam Park in favour of a closer day-trip.
From Costa Adeje hotels: the Siam Park Express is a free shuttle that runs from a handful of stops in the resort, with timetabled pick-ups starting around 9:30am. Check the park’s site the night before for that day’s schedule. Failing that, taxis are €10 to €15 each way.
From Los Cristianos and Las Americas: bus 467 from the main interchange runs every 30-45 minutes and drops you within walking distance for €1.50. Or pay for the all-inclusive ticket with transport included.
From the airport (Tenerife South, TFS): 15 minutes by taxi for around €25, or rent a car at the terminal. There’s a large free car park at Siam Park itself.
From the north of the island: if you’re staying in Puerto de la Cruz and committing to Siam Park, do it as a long day. The motorway drive south is straightforward but takes 90 minutes door-to-door. The combo with Loro Parque is more popular for visitors based in the north because Loro Parque is right there in Puerto de la Cruz.
What to Pack and What to Skip Bringing
Bring: a swimsuit (worn under your clothes so you skip the changing room queue), reef-safe sunscreen, a towel from your hotel (saves €5 rental), water shoes if you have them (the paving gets hot at midday), a waterproof phone pouch on a lanyard, and €15-20 cash for things sold in zones without contactless.
Skip: GoPros are technically allowed but easy to lose on the bigger slides. Most slides require you to keep your hands crossed across your chest, and any handheld will get yanked. If you really want footage, the on-site photo desk sells slide-photo packages for around €15 a ride; cheap is the wrong word, but they’re the only photos you’ll genuinely keep. Don’t bring food into the park, the bag check is real and they will pull out anything substantial.
Also skip: aggressive bikinis. Several rides require you to brace yourself against tube walls or to lie flat on your back, and tops have a way of departing. The Wave Palace is the worst offender. Bring a one-piece if you have one, or use a rash vest.
The Real Downsides
Siam Park is expensive. Standard entry at $52 is roughly seventy per cent more than a typical Spanish water park; in-park food at €15 a meal triples the daily cost. Lockers are an extra €10 to €15 you didn’t budget. A family of four can leave the park €300 down for one day. That’s a real number to acknowledge before you book.
It’s also crowded. From mid-July through August, the headline-ride lines hit 90 to 120 minutes, and the family raft rides (Mekong, Patong) clear an hour even off-peak. If queues annoy you, go in May, early June, or late September. The water is heated year-round, so the water itself isn’t the issue.
Wind can close rides. The hillside catches the trade winds, and on gusty days the lifeguards will close the highest slides for safety. There’s no refund if it happens; you just get fewer rides for the day. This is a low-probability event, but it’s worth knowing if your only Siam Park day falls on the windiest day of your week.
And if water parks aren’t your thing, if you don’t actually like queueing for slides, getting wet, and the noise of 6,000 people on holiday, Siam Park isn’t going to convert you. The theming is gorgeous, the engineering is real, but it’s still a water park. Loro Parque next door is the better pick if you’d rather walk and watch animals than queue for the next drop.
Who It Suits Best
Families with kids aged 6 to 14 get the most out of it. There’s enough variety across the kids’ area, the wave pool, and the rideable family rafts that nobody runs out of things to do. The Tower of Power height limit (1.4m) cuts off the youngest, but they have plenty in Sawasdee instead.
Couples and groups in their twenties or thirties get the proper thrill day; pair it with an evening in Las Americas or a quiet dinner back in Adeje. For the indoor-attraction equivalent on a city trip rather than a resort week, Madame Tussauds on Dam Square in Amsterdam covers the same big-name family-attraction slot in a couple of hours rather than a whole day. Older travellers who don’t want to ride still get a beautiful walking park with shaded pavilions and surprisingly decent food at the Beach Club. If you’ve already done some of Spain’s other big-ticket family attractions like the Barcelona Aquarium or the Valencia Oceanogràfic, Siam Park slots in as the active counterpart at a similar price tier with a completely different energy. The closer European parallel for the all-day big-ticket family blowout is a single day at Disneyland Paris, which has the same opening-to-closing structure, the same headliner-line dynamic at 11am, and the same bag of tactics for fast-tracking the most popular rides. The Italian equivalent is closer to the Genoa Aquarium in budget but Siam Park leans into adrenaline rather than glass tunnels.
Tickets, Combos, and Where Siam Park Fits in a Tenerife Week
If this is your first Tenerife trip, the smart structure for a week is one big-park day, one mountain day, one marine day, and the rest beach and pool. Siam Park is the big-park day. A Mount Teide sunset and stargazing trip is the mountain day; an evening at 3,555 metres above sea level above the cloud line is genuinely the best non-water experience on the island. A whale-watching cruise from Los Cristianos over the resident pilot whale population is the marine day; sightings are functionally guaranteed.
Pair the Siam Park day with Loro Parque a couple of days later if you’ve got the combined ticket; pair it with a kayak-and-snorkel-with-turtles morning if you’ve already done Loro Parque on a previous trip. The kayak option is interesting precisely because it’s the active outdoor counterpart to the wave-pool morning at Siam. You spend the same hours getting wet but on real Atlantic water with sea turtles passing under your kayak. There’s also a separate dolphin cruise out of Gran Canaria if you’re hopping islands.
For Tenerife days that aren’t beach or water, the inland Anaga and Teno mountain ranges are an under-rated counter-week to all the south-coast resort stuff, and the cliffside walks here are conceptually closest to the Caminito del Rey above El Chorro on the mainland. Same dramatic-drop register if you like that. Cable-car fans should pencil the Montjuïc cable car in Barcelona for a city day on a future Spain trip; it’s the urban equivalent of taking the Teide cable car for the views. And on the volcano side, Mount Vesuvius from Pompeii and Mount Etna from Catania are the Italian equivalents most travellers compare Teide to. Teide is dormant; Etna is the most active volcano in Europe; Vesuvius is the famous one but smaller.
The Records and the Reason They Matter
Siam Park has held the TripAdvisor Travellers’ Choice “World’s Best Water Park” award for ten consecutive years (2014 through 2022, and again in subsequent rounds), and won the “World’s Best Amusement Park” category in 2023. Awards are awards. They get traded around between operators, and you should always look at them sideways. But the consistency over a full decade is what’s worth taking seriously here. It’s not one good year; it’s most of a generation of travellers reporting the same experience.
What’s actually behind it: ProSlide engineering on the headline rides (the same firm that builds the major rides at Aquatica, Atlantis Aquaventure, and the bigger US chains), genuine staff-to-guest ratios on the lifeguard side, and a designer with skin in the game. Kiessling’s family runs both Siam Park and Loro Parque and reinvests park revenue into both. You can feel the difference from the moment you walk through the entrance gate; it’s the same difference between a hotel that’s owner-operated versus one held in a chain portfolio.
The Thai-themed water park concept has been imitated since (there’s a Siam Park City in Bangkok, opened earlier and unrelated to this one, plus newer Thai-themed parks in Spain and elsewhere). None have hit the same combination of hillside terrain, ProSlide headline rides, and consistent maintenance. If you’ve been to Aquatica in Orlando or Wild Wadi in Dubai and liked them, Siam Park is in the same league.
The Sustainability Bit, Briefly
Most water parks are environmental disasters: millions of litres of treated freshwater, energy-hungry filtration, the works. Siam Park runs on its own desalination plant (700 cubic metres of seawater desalinated per day for the rides, then recycled to water the park’s plants after use), and was the first Canary Islands site to install a natural-gas plant for energy. It also has its own water-heating system that keeps the rides at 25°C year-round, which means pool boilers don’t have to fight the air temperature.
It’s not a green park in any deep sense. It’s still using a lot of energy. But it’s done some of the homework that nobody else in the resort water-park category bothered with, and the recycling-water-into-the-gardens move means the planting is genuinely lush. Worth knowing if “all-inclusive resort” raises sustainability concerns for you; this is closer to “tightly-engineered industrial park” than “open-tap water consumer”.
Worth the Money?
Yes, with caveats. If you’re treating it as half-day filler, no, the price is wrong for that. If you’re treating it as a full day on the right itinerary slot, and you go in early and stay through the second wave-pool sets at 4pm, you’ll get $52 of value back. The combined ticket with Loro Parque is the smarter buy for most travellers, and the all-inclusive is genuinely the right answer in July and August.
I’ve been five or six times across different trips and the rides still hold up. The Tower of Power still gets the gut-shot. Mai Thai River still does the slow-circuit thing better than anything else. The theming still surprises me. The ticket-line jump from gate to all-inclusive is the only place where I’d push back on the pricing, but even there, on the right day in the right month, it’s the right answer.
What Else to Plan Around It
If Siam Park is the anchor of your Tenerife week, build outward from there. Two days before or after, do whale watching from Los Cristianos or Loro Parque on the combo ticket. Save your Mount Teide sunset and stargazing trip for a clear night midweek; check the cloud forecast, because the trade-wind cloud layer can sit at exactly the worst altitude and the views vanish. If you’re island-hopping to Gran Canaria for a day, the dolphin cruise there is a sister marine experience to whale-watching off Tenerife.
For aquarium fans not yet headed to Loro Parque, the Barcelona Aquarium, Valencia Oceanogràfic, and Genoa Aquarium are the three big Mediterranean comparisons; Loro Parque is wider in scope (parrots, dolphins, killer whales) but the Mediterranean trio is more focused on big-tank marine life. If you’re putting together a kid-friendly Spain trip and Tenerife is one stop, pair it with a couple of mainland Spanish trips like Montserrat from Barcelona or the Caminito del Rey above El Chorro for the contrast between resort-water-park energy and the older, slower mainland day-out style.
One last note: Siam Park is open year-round, which on this island matters. Most northern European water parks shut from October to April, and most of mainland Spain’s outdoor parks shut from November to March. Tenerife’s south coast averages 22°C in January and the park’s heated water doesn’t notice the calendar. Going in shoulder season is the smart play if you can swing it.