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The record
2.81 million visitors
Chimelong Water Park
China
The record
The most visited water park in the world is Chimelong Water Park, in China — 2.81 million visitors, annual attendance.
Source: TEA Global Experience Index 2024. Verified .
Ask which water park the world visits most and almost nobody guesses Guangzhou. Chimelong Water Park drew 2.81 million people in 2024, comfortably ahead of anything in Florida, and the parks chasing it are stranger still - a Bavarian thermal spa, a Dubai resort complex and a Brazilian hot-springs park all outrank Disney.
The countdown runs from 2.81 million down to 1.3 million across eight countries and four continents, and it follows two rules. First, every figure is a single gated park's own annual attendance as published in the TEA Global Experience Index, the industry's standard register, so a sprawling resort is split back into the individual gates people actually pay to enter.
Second, every park here welcomes visitors today. Those rules cost the list two famous names: Disney's Blizzard Beach, which shares its operating season with Typhoon Lagoon and so misses the global twenty entirely, and South Korea's Caribbean Bay, which lands sixteenth.
Fun Facts About the World’s Most Visited Water Parks
The most visited water park on earth is in China, not the United States — Chimelong Water Park in Guangzhou draws more admissions than any park in Orlando, and no other park on this list comes within 800,000 visitors of it.
Two of the twelve are indoor thermal resorts rather than outdoor slide parks. Therme Erding near Munich ranks third worldwide, ahead of every Disney and Universal water park, and Therme Bucharest, just outside the Romanian capital, takes ninth.
Three separate parks called Aquaventure appear on this list — in Dubai, the Bahamas and Hainan — all built under the Atlantis resort brand.
Ranks seven and eight are a genuine tie.Atlantis Sanya and Universal Volcano Bay both recorded 1.65 million visitors, and the index publishes them as joint seventh.
Sunway Lagoon sits on a worked-out tin mine. The lagoons at the centre of the Malaysian park are old mine workings that filled with water before the site was redeveloped.
At 2.81 million visitors, Chimelong Water Park is the most visited water park on earth, and the gap is not close - no other park on this list comes within 800,000 admissions of it.
It sits inside the Chimelong Tourist Resort in Panyu, on the southern edge of Guangzhou, sharing a sprawling complex with a theme park, a circus and a safari park. The attendance counted here belongs to the water park's own gate alone, which is what makes the number so striking: this is a single ticketed attraction pulling crowds most theme parks would envy.
Scale is the whole design philosophy. The layout runs to banks of parallel racing slides, a wave pool built for arrivals measured in tens of thousands, and dense tropical planting that disguises how much ground the place covers.
It operates seasonally, roughly from spring into autumn, adding evening sessions through the hottest stretch of the Guangdong summer, when a night swim beats a daytime one. If you want to see the outer limit of how large a water park can grow before it stops feeling like one, this is the reference case.
At 2 million visitors, Aquaventure World takes second place, and it climbed there faster than anything else here - attendance rose 11.1% in 2024, the largest single-year gain among the twelve. The park runs along the crescent of Palm Jumeirah in Dubai and is counted as one ticketed complex spanning the Atlantis resorts, so the figure represents a single admission rather than a resort-wide tally.
What sets it apart is verticality and volume: near-vertical drop capsules, a chain of tube slides threaded through and around the resort architecture, and a lagoon stocked so that a snorkel run doubles as an aquarium visit.
Its operators also claim a Guinness World Records title for the most waterslides in a water park - a measure of hardware, not of crowds, and a different thing entirely from the attendance that ranks it here. The park runs year-round, with the heat of high summer pushing visitors toward the shaded and the fast-moving.
Therme Erding's 1.91 million visitors make it the most visited water park in Europe and the third most visited anywhere, which surprises anyone who assumes a water park means slides under an open sky. Erding is a thermal resort north-east of Munich, built above a hot spring, and it earns its place on this list because that is functionally what it is - a gated attraction whose entire draw is water.
The complex layers three moods under one roof: a palm-planted thermal hall kept warm year-round, an extensive sauna world, and a slide tower that would not look out of place in Florida.
Bavarian winters are the secret to the attendance, because an indoor tropical pool is a far easier sell in February than in July, which gives Erding a demand curve almost inverted from the outdoor parks it outranks. Its thermal water is drawn from deep beneath the site and is the reason the resort exists where it does.
With 1.85 million visitors, Thermas dos Laranjais is the most visited water park in South America and the fourth most visited in the world. It stands in Olimpia, an interior town in Sao Paulo state that has rebuilt its economy around thermal tourism, and it has been drawing crowds since it opened in 1987 - long before the surrounding resort industry grew up around it.
The water is the differentiator. It rises naturally warm from the Guarani Aquifer, one of the largest underground freshwater reserves on the planet, which means the pools stay comfortable through the Brazilian winter and the park can run every day of the year.
The attraction list has grown steadily across four decades into slide complexes, a wave beach and a slow river, and the crowd is overwhelmingly domestic - this is a park Brazilians go to, rather than one built for foreign visitors.
55. Disney's Typhoon Lagoon
Walt Disney World Resort, Lake Buena Vista, Florida, United States
At 1.82 million visitors, Disney's Typhoon Lagoon is the most visited water park in North America. Its premise is a storm-wrecked resort - a shrimp boat marooned on a peak above the surf pool, palms leaning at angles no gardener intended - and that surf pool remains the headline, generating waves large enough to knock an adult off their feet at intervals announced by a horn.
There is a scheduling quirk behind its ranking. Walt Disney World runs two water parks and has kept them on alternating seasonal rotations since 2020, with Typhoon Lagoon generally holding the busier stretches of the calendar. That arrangement concentrates Orlando's Disney water-park demand into one gate for much of the year, which is why Typhoon Lagoon appears on this global list and Blizzard Beach, its sibling across the resort, does not.
Aquaventure at Atlantis Paradise Island drew 1.79 million visitors, sixth on the global list and the highest-placed park in the Caribbean. Spread across 141 acres on Paradise Island outside Nassau, it is one of three Atlantis-branded water parks in this countdown and carries all their signature furniture - a Mayan-temple slide tower, a network of river rides, and lagoons where the snorkelling shares water with sharks and rays behind glass.
Its attendance is unusually exposed to forces outside the gate. Nassau is a cruise port, and the industry's own analysts note that this park swings with ship arrivals and broader tourism patterns more than a park serving a resident population would. Numbers slipped 5.3% in 2024 for exactly that reason. Access is also tied to the resort in a way most parks on this list are not, which shapes who ends up inside on any given day.
Aquaventure Waterpark at Atlantis Sanya recorded 1.65 million visitors - a figure the index publishes as a dead tie for seventh with Universal Volcano Bay, the two parks separated by nothing at all. It occupies Haitang Bay on the island of Hainan, China's tropical southern resort province, and at around 200,000 square metres it is the largest water park in Asia by area.
Hainan's climate is the commercial argument: this park runs year-round while most Chinese water parks, including the one at the top of this list, operate only through the warmer months. The theming leans hard into the Atlantis formula, with a central temple structure feeding near-vertical drops and looping tubes, and it opened most recently of the three Aquaventures here, which shows in the ride hardware. It grew 3.1% in 2024, quietly outperforming both sibling parks.
88. Universal Volcano Bay
Universal Orlando Resort, Orlando, Florida, United States
Universal Volcano Bay also drew 1.65 million visitors, tying it with Atlantis Sanya for seventh in the index's published ranking. Universal built it as a full third gate at its Orlando resort rather than a bolt-on water park, and the design centres on Krakatau, a 200-foot volcano that anchors the site and hides a launched water coaster inside it.
Its signature idea was operational rather than architectural: a wearable virtual-queue system that holds your place in line while you swim elsewhere, an attempt to solve the problem every water park shares of guests spending their day standing on wet concrete. Attendance fell 8.3% in 2024, the second-steepest decline among these twelve, in a year when Orlando's water-park market softened generally.
Therme Bucharest attracted 1.61 million visitors, ninth worldwide and the second European entry on this list. It sits at Balotesti, just north of the Romanian capital and close to the main airport, and it follows the same logic as Therme Erding - a vast glasshouse of thermal pools, palms and slides that turns a grey Central European winter into an argument for going swimming.
Attendance grew 5.9% in 2024, one of the stronger gains here, in a region where this kind of large-scale wellness attraction was essentially absent a generation ago. The building is organised in zones that shade from family water play through to adults-only thermal bathing, so a single gate serves audiences that most parks would need separate venues to satisfy. Its water is geothermal, drawn from beneath the site rather than heated, which is what makes year-round operation economic.
Aquatica Orlando's 1.44 million visitors place it tenth, and it is the third Orlando park on this list - a concentration no other city comes close to matching. Attendance was essentially flat in 2024, down just 0.1%, the steadiest performance of the twelve in a year when most parks moved several points in one direction or the other.
It is the water park attached to the SeaWorld side of Orlando's attraction map, and its distinguishing feature has always been the animal habitats built into the rides, most famously a pair of tube slides that pass through a lagoon of Commerson's dolphins.
Unlike the Disney water parks nearby it operates all year, heating its water through the cooler months and trading long summer days for shorter winter ones. It finished barely 8,000 visitors ahead of the park ranked below it, the narrowest margin anywhere in this countdown.
Hot Park finished 2024 with 1.43 million visitors, eleventh worldwide and the second Brazilian entry, landing about 8,000 admissions behind Aquatica Orlando. It stands at Rio Quente in the state of Goias, deep in Brazil's central highlands, and it takes both its water and its name from the thermal river running through the site.
That river is the attraction's foundation, because naturally heated groundwater surfaces here in volume, feeding pools that need no boiler and stay swimmable through every season.
The park pairs it with conventional slide hardware and an artificial beach, and it functions as the anchor of a resort complex that has made this corner of Goias a domestic holiday fixture. Its 10.8% decline was the steepest on this list, a swing that says more about Brazil's domestic travel market in 2024 than about the park itself.
Sunway Lagoon rounds out the twelve with 1.3 million visitors, and it grew 8.3% in 2024 - the second-largest gain here, which the industry attributes to Southeast Asian tourism continuing to recover. The park sits in Bandar Sunway on the edge of Kuala Lumpur, built over reclaimed tin-mining land that was worked out and flooded before the site was redeveloped.
That origin explains the topography, because the lagoons at the centre of the park are the old workings filled with water, which gives it a landscape most purpose-built water parks have to fake.
It is also only partly a water park: the gate covers a cluster of connected zones running from water rides through a small wildlife park and an extreme-sports area, though it is the water side that carries the attendance. A surf beach and a long looping river form the core of it.
FAQ: The World’s Most Visited Water Parks
What is the most visited water park in the world?
Chimelong Water Park in Guangzhou, China, with 2.81 million visitors in the most recent full reporting year. It leads by a wide margin: the second-placed park, Aquaventure World in Dubai, drew 2 million, and no other water park on the planet has come close to Chimelong's totals in recent years.
How are these water parks ranked?
By annual attendance at a single gated park, as published in the TEA Global Experience Index, the attractions industry's standard attendance register. Counting one gate at a time matters, because several of these parks sit inside much larger resorts whose combined visitor numbers would be far higher and not comparable.
Why do European thermal spas appear on a water park list?
Because the industry register counts them. Therme Erding in Bavaria and Therme Bucharest in Romania are gated attractions built entirely around water, with slides alongside their thermal pools. Their indoor setting is an advantage rather than a handicap, since a warm pool sells better in a Northern European February than in July.
Which city has the most parks in the global top twelve?
Orlando, with three: Disney's Typhoon Lagoon, Universal Volcano Bay and Aquatica Orlando. No other city holds more than one place. Orlando's water parks benefit from the enormous flow of visitors that its theme parks already draw to the area, which keeps all three gates busy.
Do these rankings change from year to year?
They shift, though less than theme park rankings do. Weather, tourism patterns and seasonal operating decisions move individual parks several percent a year, and the order below the top few can reshuffle. The leader has been far more stable, so our list is the place to check the current standings. Height, length and speed get their own treatment across our world record-breakers countdowns.
