About the archive
Joost de Bruin has been visiting Efteling since 1978, when his grandparents took him to see the Holle Bolle Gijs eat his first paper cup. He has, since then, walked the fairy-tale forest more than four hundred times and written about it on the side. This is the archive of what he has written, gathered in one place.
The archive is not affiliated with the park. It is a personal project that has been maintained in one form or another since the late 1990s — originally as a printed zine that I produced for friends, then as a small wiki that has been migrated through three CMSes, and now as this static archive. The current iteration is meant to be readable rather than complete; I have written about the things I find most interesting, and there are several large attractions and rides that I have not yet written about.
I write about once a month. Suggestions are welcome by email; if you have a memory of a specific tableau in the fairy-tale forest from a decade I have not covered, I would like to hear about it.
Based in: Tilburg, North Brabant
Visiting the park since: 1978
Contact: hello@example.invalid
A reading archive about one Dutch theme park — its history, its architecture, its rides, its fairy-tale forest. The essays are long-form, written without a deadline, and updated when I notice something I have not yet written about. There is no schedule, no newsletter, and no advertising. The park is, in my view, an unusual cultural object — a single illustrator's pen line, made buildable, maintained for seventy-four years — and worth thinking about at the pace of a long essay rather than the pace of a tweet.
This site does not sell anything. It does not arrange visits, accommodations, or queue passes; for those, the park's own site is the authoritative place to look. The archive is also not the place to look for current pricing, opening hours, or event schedules — those change with the season and are kept current on the park's official channels. What I write about is the park as a designed object, not as an itinerary.