Walk into Busch Gardens Williamsburg through Banbury Cross and the first thing you notice is the Big Ben. Not the real one - a simulacrum of Elizabeth Tower, sized down to fit a park entrance, half-timbered Tudor buildings huddled at its base. Turn the corner past the Globe Theatre - a double-sized replica of Shakespeare's London playhouse - and the path climbs toward Heatherdowns, the Scottish hamlet, where Clydesdales and Border Collies wait beside a working train station. The park covers 422 acres of woods, ravines, and bridges across the Rhine River, all of it themed to a traditional postcard Europe that doesn't quite exist. The Loch Ness Monster's interlocking loops loom above the trees. The whole thing opened on May 16, 1975, and it has never really stopped expanding.
Busch Gardens Williamsburg exists because two men with money agreed on a strategy. In the 1960s and 1970s, Winthrop Rockefeller - then Governor of Arkansas and chairman of Colonial Williamsburg - met with Gussie Busch of Anheuser-Busch and negotiated a package deal that brought a brewery, a theme park, the Kingsmill resort, and residential and commercial development to the Williamsburg area. The land that became the park had once been Kingsmill Plantation, fallen into ruin and disuse, primarily wooded and hilly, never well suited to agriculture. It was, however, ideally suited to roller coasters. The park opened on May 16, 1975 as Busch Gardens: The Old Country, eight months before Six Flags would acquire its first East Coast property. In 2008, Anheuser-Busch was sold to Belgium's InBev, and the theme parks were spun off to Blackstone in 2009, then folded into what is now United Parks & Resorts.
The park is organized as ten European hamlets - England, Scotland, Ireland, France, French Colonial Canada, two German hamlets representing the Rhineland and Bavaria, and three Italian sections including Festa Italia, which celebrates Marco Polo's return from China. Two transportation systems thread the hamlets together. The Aeronaut Skyride, a gondola lift, runs between Sesame Street Forest of Fun, Aquitaine, and Rhinefeld. The Busch Gardens Railway runs three steam locomotives on a 1.5-mile narrow-gauge loop, calling at Heatherdowns, Festa Italia, and New France. The English hamlet was rethemed Ireland as Killarney in 2001 - the first new country in over twenty years - and park attendance reportedly jumped 17 percent in the year that followed. The hamlet's centerpiece, Celtic Fyre at the Abbey Stone Theatre, was named USA Today's number one Best Amusement Park Entertainment in 2021.
Busch Gardens Williamsburg has accumulated a serious coaster collection. Loch Ness Monster opened in 1978 as an Arrow Development looper and is the first and only roller coaster in the world to feature interlocking loops, where two trains pass through the same vertical loops at the same moment. Alpengeist, opened 1997, is a Bolliger and Mabillard inverted coaster themed to a ski lift overtaken by an Alpine ghost - cyan and white, six inversions, station decorated like a ski lodge. Apollo's Chariot, opened 1999, was the first Bolliger and Mabillard Hyper Coaster, all dive-toward-water airtime and gold-and-purple paint. Griffon dropped riders ninety degrees from 205 feet starting in 2007. Verbolten opened in 2012 on the site of the old Big Bad Wolf, a Black Forest-themed launched coaster with a track that drops vertically while staying on a horizontal plane. Pantheon, an Intamin multi-launch coaster, threw a fifth full-circuit coaster into the Festa Italia lineup. DarKoaster, the world's first all-indoor straddle coaster, opened in May 2023 in the former Curse of DarKastle dark ride building.
The park's seasonal events have become destinations of their own. Howl-O-Scream, the Halloween event, began in 1999 with vampires, zombies, witches, and skeletons stalking the hamlets after dark. Christmas Town, launched in 2009, decorates the park with millions of lights and dozens of real Christmas trees. A 50-foot tree called O Tannenbaum sits in the Oktoberfest hamlet, lighting up in sync to Christmas music. Each show venue hosts a holiday production - a Scrooge adaptation called Scrooge No More, an ice-skating show titled Twas That Night on Ice, an a-cappella performance called Gift of Harmony. The English hamlet around Banbury Cross stays lit in red and gold. Italy's Escape From Pompeii ride is transformed for the season into the Polar Pathway. The Aquitaine hamlet glows at dusk in soft amber. Beginning in January 2021, the park began year-round operation - the first winters in its history.
Jack Hanna's Wild Reserve, originally opened in 2000 and merged with the Killarney hamlet as the Jack Hanna Trail in 2017, includes Eagle Ridge, a 3,000-square-foot rehabilitation area for bald eagles, and Wolf Haven and Wolf Valley, together covering more than 8,000 square feet of natural habitat for gray wolves. Lorikeet Glen is a walk-in aviary where rainbow lorikeets land on visitors' shoulders. The Highland Stables between the England and Scotland sections feature Scottish Blackface sheep, Border Collies, black Clydesdales, and Highland cattle. Before 2010, the stables housed several of the Anheuser-Busch Clydesdales themselves, until the theme park unit was sold off in the InBev breakup. The brewery is gone from the family, the Clydesdales travel under different banners now, but the stables they once knew still stand at the top of the hill above Banbury Cross.
Coordinates approximately 37.2333°N, 76.6444°W. The 422-acre park is in James City County, just southeast of Williamsburg, immediately south of Interstate 64 and east of U.S. Route 60. From the air, look for the blue-and-white track of Alpengeist, the orange-purple Apollo's Chariot, and the Aeronaut Skyride towers. Best viewed 2,000-3,500 feet AGL. Nearest airports: Williamsburg-Jamestown (KJGG) about 5 nm west, Newport News/Williamsburg International (KPHF) about 10 nm southeast.