Picture the Belgian coast: wind-combed dunes, gray-green North Sea, frites with a wall of mayonnaise. Now plant a gnome the size of a house in the middle of it, add a Viking village, an Egyptian launch coaster, and a rollercoaster co-branded with a techno festival — and you’ve got Plopsaland De Panne, one of the most cheerfully bonkers theme parks in Europe. The best part? It started as a honey stand. 🐝
From bees to gnomes: a very Belgian origin story
Back in 1935, a honey seller named Alberic-Joseph Florizoone opened Meli Park in the dunes of De Panne — Meli being the honey brand, and the whole place themed around bees and the busy life of the hive. 🐝 For decades it puttered along as a sweet little coastal attraction, all flowers and beehives and gentle rides.
Then in 1999, Belgian media giant Studio 100 — the folks behind a whole universe of beloved kids’ TV shows — bought the place and gave it a total glow-up. It reopened on 20 April 2000 as Plopsaland, named for two of Studio 100’s most famous characters: Plop, a forest gnome, and Samson, a big shaggy talking dog. (“Plop” + “Sa-mson” = Plopsa.) The honeybees made way for gnomes, and a legend was born.
There’s a wonderful footnote to the rebrand: Studio 100 nearly called the park “Pannadine” (a nod to the town of De Panne) — until somebody pointed out that Pannadine was already the brand name of a medical skin cream. A bullet, gloriously, dodged. 🧴
The headliner: a coaster co-branded with a music festival
Belgium is also home to Tomorrowland, one of the biggest electronic dance music festivals on Earth — so in 2021, Plopsaland did the only logical thing and built a rollercoaster with it. The Ride to Happiness by Tomorrowland is Europe’s first Mack Extreme Spinning Coaster: the cars freely spin as you go, the track launches you backward and forward, and the whole thing tops out at a genuinely alarming 90 km/h (about 56 mph). It’s a full-on festival drop in steel form, sitting in a park that, again, used to sell honey. 🎢
That’s the thing about Plopsaland — it doesn’t pick a lane. It will absolutely terrify a thrill-seeking teenager and delight a four-year-old who just wants to high-five a gnome, often within fifty meters of each other.
Mummies, Vikings, and a wooden coaster named Heidi
The coaster lineup is a tour through Studio 100’s whole imaginary universe. Anubis: The Ride (2009) is a launched coaster themed around the Belgian-Dutch teen show Het Huis Anubis — it fires you out of the station and flips you through inversions under an Egyptian temple facade. 🏺
Then there’s Heidi The Ride (2017), a wooden coaster themed to the little Alpine girl of storybook fame, rattling along at up to 71 km/h — because nothing says “Swiss mountain idyll” like a wooden rollercoaster on the Belgian coast. There’s a Vic the Viking village, a Maya the Bee zone (the bees came back!), and rides built around Samson en Gert, Bumba, and Kabouter Plop. If you grew up on Flemish kids’ TV, the whole park is basically your childhood, scaled up and bolted to steel track.
Why this lives on a good-news blog
Because Plopsaland is a ninety-year-old reminder that the best places are the ones that kept saying yes. A honey seller said yes to a few rides in the dunes. A TV company said yes to building it back bigger. The park said yes to gnomes, yes to Vikings, yes to mummies, and yes to a 90-km/h coaster named after a rave. Nobody ever decided what kind of place it should be — they just kept adding the next delightful thing. 🎢
These days the Plopsa resort has grown to include the Plopsaqua water park, the Mayaland indoor park, a hotel, and a campsite — a whole little coastal kingdom of joy that drew roughly 1.4 million visitors in 2017. Not bad for a place that started by selling jars of honey. 🐝💛
