Hey roller coaster enthusiasts, let’s talk bucket list destinations! So many wonderful thrill rides are in California and Florida that you may not feel ambitious when you book your vacations. That’s a mistake! Lots of phenomenal coasters are well worth a visit, and you get to add a stamp to your passport when you visit them! Here are nine of the best roller coasters outside the United States.
Lisebergbanan
For more than 70 years now, Liseberg has entertained theme park tourists during their visits to the gloriously named Gothenburg, Sweden. Since 1987, the anchor attraction that has thrilled coaster enthusiasts is Lisebergbanan. Yes, the name of the ride is the park’s name plus banan, which only makes sense if you speak Swedish.
Don’t get distracted by the details. Instead, focus on what’s important. Lisebergbanan is one of the greatest group roller coasters ever made. Due to its unique design of five coaster trains, each with 11 dual-person cars, it’s capable of carrying 110 passengers per ride batch! You and 21 of your closest friends can enjoy two minutes of runaway train action, as your vehicle reaches 50 miles per hour across extremely bumpy terrain. It’s a timeless coaster classic that still wins industry awards for popularity today!
Medusa
Ride conversions are all the rage in coaster design, and that statement holds true south of the border, too. Six Flags Mexico originally built one of the only wooden roller coasters in Latin America.
The ride known as Medusa debuted in 2000, but it closed permanently in 2013. In its place, a new Medusa arose. This one was a steel coaster built in the same place as its predecessor. Like many retrofit coaster conversions, it maintained the core wooden structure but replaced the tracks with steel ones. The end result is a 118-feet tall coaster with a 98-foot drop that produces a top speed of 58 miles per hour. Medusa’s improvements didn’t stop there, either. Six Flags also added a virtual reality element in 2017!
Black Mamba
Yes, that is Kobe Bryant’s nickname. No, he doesn’t have anything to do with this ride. In fact, the good people of Brühl, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany probably aren’t huge NBA fans. The developers of Phantasialand theme park are master builders, though.
Black Mamba is an inverted coaster whose snaking nature organically led to the name of the ride. In fact, the name impacted the coaster’s design, as engineers emphasized the snaking style in two ways. First, the coaster features up to 4 Gs of force stemming from the slithering inversions. It also claims the helix with the smallest radius that developer Bolliger & Mabillard has ever built. In other words, it’s the tightest snaking inversion ever, a sensation you have to experience to fully appreciate.
Helix
More than 27 years after their most famous roller coaster debuted, the park planners at Liseberg designed to up the ante. They built a new steel roller coaster with an imaginative ride start. It has a 135-foot tall dual-launch helix. That’s a fancy way of saying that it has two launches, each of which uses Linear Synchronous Motors (LSMs) to launch guests at a high speed.
Due to the novel helix design highlighted through the attraction, it’s the second-longest roller coaster to feature inversions in the entire world. You’ll struggle to catch your breath as you loop in and out repeatedly. There are seven in total during the 135 seconds of the ride, and you’ll be going 62 miles per hour through a couple of them.
PS: Helix and Lisebergbanan actually interact with one another at multiple points. How great is that?
PPS: It also recently added a virtual reality element. Face it. That’s a thing now.
Nemesis
Alton Towers in England is near and dear to the hearts of the owners of Theme Park Tourist as well as many of its writers. One of the best coasters here has been in operation since 1994, and it has won many industry awards over the years due to its clever design.
Nemesis is an inverted roller coaster that stood apart from its peers in the international marketplace for many years. It was the first inverted coaster in Europe to feature inversions, an idea so shocking at the time that Alton Towers had to make future concessions to Six Flags to learn details of the construction.
With a maximum drop of 104 feet and four inversions along the way, Nemesis feels much faster than its top speed of 50 miles per hour in the same manner that Space Mountain does. The structure of the coaster tracks combined with the inversions prevents the rider from feeling comfortable during the experience. It’s a good kind of unsettled, the kind that differentiates the best ride designs from the rest. After almost 25 years in operation, Nemesis still enjoys tremendous repeat value, which is why riders continue to visit from around the world.
Blue Fire
Europa-Park in Iceland wants to know what you’re feeling. Tell them what’s on your mind.
Yes, the tagline for Blue Fire is “Discover Pure Energy,” which gives anyone who remembers Information Society at a What’s on Your Mind earworm. They’re a bit cheeky with the marketing campaign because they know that their ride is an instant classic. Since 2009, this launched steel roller coaster has dazzled theme park tourists with its velocity.
Blue Fire is another LSM-designed coaster that gives riders an immediate adrenaline surge. After only 2.5 seconds, you’re at the top speed of 62 miles per hour, and you maintain that velocity for the next 150 seconds as you tear through four inversions and 3,464 feet worth of track. And you also experience a novel twisted horseshoe roll, something that’s possible on less than five coasters in the world today. Blue Fire is the hottest thing in Iceland.
Taron
After our second visit to Sweden, we return to Phantasialand in Germany. Just as some American parks such as Cedar Point and Knott’s Berry Farm are coaster capitals here, other international parks earn that designation, too.
The other Phantasialand choice is Taron, which immediately claimed a couple of world records (actually four) when it opened during the summer of 2016. This is the fastest multi-launch coaster in the world, which means that I now have the attention of every adrenaline junkie. Taron is also the longest multi-launch coaster with the most intense LSM and the largest number of intersections in the world.
I could keep talking, but you get the point. This is arguably the most technologically innovative attraction ever built outside the United States. So, let’s just go over some quick stats and be done with it.
Taron tops out at 72 miles per hour, 10 MPH more than Helix, the previous record holder. It’s also 4,593 feet long, 62 feet longer than Helix. So, it’s specifically designed as a Helix killer. And it has tracks that cross over 116 times, which is to say that Taron features 58 ride intersections. If you haven’t read this and immediately started planning a trip to Germany, you shouldn’t call yourself a true coaster fanatic.
Leviathan
If we’re going to mention something south of the border, we can’t very well exclude our neighbors to the north. Fortunately, they have a steel roller coaster that’s more than deserving of this list. Canada’s Wonderland is the largest theme park in the country as well as the most popular seasonal park in North America. Weather concerns obviously prevent it from operating year-round, so you’ll want to check the seasonal schedule before planning a trip.
While Canada’s Wonderland has 16 roller coasters, third-most in the world, the best of the bunch is clearly Leviathan. It’s a giga-coaster that dazzles with its specs. The ride stands 306 feet tall yet somehow offers a 306-foot drop. The trick is that you fall at an 80-degree angle, which isn’t quite straight down, but it’s close enough that you’ll feel your heart in your stomach as you speed down the tracks. And you’ll do that at 82 miles per hour, best of anything on this list.
Leviathan isn’t fancy the way that some of the other ride designs listed here are. Instead, it gets by on pure power. You’ll face 4.5 Gs of force during the ride, which lasts a whopping three and a half minutes thanks to the 5,486 feet of track. This ride isn’t subtle. If you’re a true thrill ride junkie, however, Leviathan is an absolute must.
Expedition GeForce
A second popular theme park resides in Germany. It’s Holiday Park in Haßloch, Germany, and while this place isn’t as popular as Phantasialand, it has the best roller coaster in the country.
At the turn of the millennium, plenty of roller coaster designers wanted to leave their imprints on the industry. Expedition GeForce was the finest creation outside the continental United States. That’s because it’s structurally similar to Millennium Force at Cedar Point, only on a (slightly) smaller scale.
The Holiday Park version follows that basic premise of going way up and then falling almost straight down at extreme velocity. While Expedition GeForce “only” rises 174 feet in the air, it still drops guests at an 82-degree angle, quickly accelerating coaster carts to almost 75 miles per hour.
For years, Expedition GeForce was the tallest roller coaster in Europe, and it’s one of the most decorated international steel roller coasters. The Golden Ticket Awards have placed it in the top three on four different occasions, and it’s currently listed as the fifth-best of its kind in the world. While all of the international coasters listed here justify a vacation trip abroad, Expedition GeForce is unquestionably the best of the bunch.
