Fantasilandia, Amusement park in O'Higgins Park, Santiago, Chile
Fantasilandia is an amusement park in a corner of Parque O'Higgins in Santiago, opened in 1978. Its rides are grouped as thrilling, gentle and child rides, among them the Boomerang coaster, 40 metres tall with a 360-degree loop and a 572-metre circuit, the Raptor inverted coaster built by Vekoma, and the Tsunami shoot-the-chute built in Chile under Intamin licence.
The park opened in January 1978 with eight initial attractions and became the largest facility of its kind in Chile. The site expanded over the following decades and added new roller coasters and themed zones regularly.
The park's name combines "fantasy" with "land". Its founders were the Belgian priest Josse Van Der Rest and the agronomist Gerardo Arteaga, who met at San Ignacio College and later bought the bumper cars Van Der Rest had brought from Europe; these became the park's first rides. In 2015 Arteaga Cerda was named president of the IAAPA, which represents more than 5,300 companies in 99 countries.
The park occupies a corner of O'Higgins Park in Santiago and is scheduled to close there around 2027, when operations move to San Bernardo. The Palacio de Cristal restaurant, opened in 1990, seats 300 people. The Bongo-Train crosses the grounds, useful for reaching distant rides.
The roller coaster Raptor from 2008 suspends riders below the track and flips them upside down several times during the ride. The system reaches around 50 miles per hour (80 kilometers per hour) and is one of only two installations of this type on the South American continent.
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