Project "PLANTERRA"
Here's my park project story I talked about in the "What are YOU doing in NL2 Right now?" thread.
Returning from the USA in the 70's, a french businessman which made a fortune in the botanical industry had the idea to create a park that could gather people around his passion, botany. So he opened a sort of botanical garden in 1984 named ?? Planterra ??. This garden had some rides like a playground and Antique Cars.
His park worked quite well. Then, in the late 1980s, there was a decline in attendance (due to the opening of Parc Ast??rix, Futuroscope and Mirapolis). In order to bring back a few visitors to the park, he built rides including a family coaster (Schwarzkopf Enigma like coaster). Attendance reached pikes that the park had never reached before. As a result, more visitors came to th park. After this rapid gain of money, its founder bought a wooden coaster at auction in the USA (in 1991). The ride remained a year in its original park (fictitious) until the botanical garden finds the money needed to relocate it in France and install it. Finally, in 1993 the wooden coaster opened. It was a great success. Unfortunately, at the end of the 1993 season, the founder of the park died. His children succeeded in 1994 but were unable to manage the park properly (because of Disney among other things).
Thus, in 1995, the park, bankrupt at that time, was bought out by the Walibi Group. So the start of the season was somehow delayed. The following year, the park acquired a new thrilling coaster. They also added a few more rides.
On April 1st, 1998, Oklahoma City-based Premier Parks bought the entire Six Flags Theme Parks Inc. for $ 1.9 billion. The new owner is launching a park renaming campaign with the prefix "Six Flags" and the expansion of small parks with the Six Flags formula such as Darien Lake, Elitch Gardens and Adventure World. Premier Parks also bought the Walibi Group's European parks. Three of the European parks are also renamed Six Flags: Walibi Flevo in the Netherlands, Walibi Wavre in Belgium and the botanical garden (name to be determined) in France, renamed Six Flags Holland, Six Flags Belgium and Six Flags France.
In March 2004, due to poor financial results, Six Flags resold European parks to Palamon Capital Partners. It then became the property of Star Parks, formed around the Palamon investor. The park is directly resold by Star Parks to a real estate investor who wanted to destroy it to build houses there. It was held open one last season by the new owner at the request of the visitors.
Finally, the area where the park was located was very wet and it was impossible to build houses without spending millions to redevelop the land. Since September 2005, the park has been abandoned. The vegetation gradually takes over.
To be continued???