Dream Park (amusement park)

Dream Park (Arabic: دريم بارك) is an amusement park on Oasis Road in 6th of October City, Giza Governorate, Egypt, about 8 km (5.0 mi) from the Pyramids of Giza. Covering 150 acres (61 ha), it was described at its opening as the largest amusement park in the Middle East. The Egyptian businessman Ahmed Bahgat developed the park, which opened in 1999. The Canadian firm Forrec, which has also worked on Universal Studios Florida, master-planned the site. The park can hold about 30,000 visitors a day. The park belongs to Dreamland (دريم لاند), a larger development by Bahgat that fell into heavy debt during the 2010s. After a decade of litigation, ownership passed to two state-linked banks in 2021, which have since sought to sell the underlying land for redevelopment. History Founding and design Dream Park opened in 1999 as the centrepiece of Dreamland, a gated development in 6th of October City built by Ahmed Bahgat through the Bahgat Group. Bahgat had grown wealthy in electronics and later in private broadcasting. Bahgat commissioned Forrec, the Canadian firm behind parts of Universal Studios Florida, to master-plan the park. Forrec's master plan gave the park a North American theme-park layout, filled with rides from Western manufacturers. Invest-Gate later recalled the park's early years as drawing year-round crowds and long queues. Dreamland complex Dream Park forms part of Dreamland, whose construction began in the mid-1990s on desert land the Egyptian state sold to Bahgat. Under the original contract with the New Urban Communities Authority, the Bahgat group bought about 2,045 feddan (roughly 8.6 km2 (3.3 sq mi)) in 6th of October City to build a residential city, a golf course, a sports club, shops, cinemas, and an amusement park. Marketed as the country's first "electronic city" of fibre-wired villas, the wider development has drawn scholarly criticism. The economist David Sims considered Cairo's desert new-towns, Dreamland among them, as a speculative frontier the state opened and then failed to govern. Timothy Mitchell, writing when the project was new, read it as an example of 1990s Egyptian neoliberalism, in which cheap state land and state subsidized roads served private speculation. Bank seizure Bahgat borrowed heavily from Egyptian banks, mainly the National Bank of Egypt, and defaulted. A debt to the National Bank of Egypt and Banque Misr was first restructured in 2004 under Central Bank supervision, and when it went unpaid the Central Bank referred him to the public prosecutor. Accounts of Bahgat's relationship with the Mubarak government conflict. Mitchell reported a widespread view of him as a regime front, citing the speed with which state roads reached the site. Bahgat rejected this. In a 2016 interview he dated official hostility to 2002 and attributed it to a dispute with the Central Bank governor, casting himself as an enemy of the state rather than one of its beneficiaries. He said that after the 2011 revolution his case was referred to the Illicit Gains Authority, which investigates officials and business figures linked to the former government, and he described the referral as persecution. In 2017 the Court of Cassation, ruling on an appeal by the National Bank of Egypt (case 4715/86), affirmed the banks' right to sell most of Bahgat's Dreamland assets against a debt of about E£3 billion. The dispute had run for more than ten years. In October 2021 the banks, their investment arm the Egyptian Company for Real Estate Assets Management and Investment, and Bahgat's Dreamland group agreed to settle all outstanding litigation, transferring the roughly 4,000,000 m2 (990 acres) Dreamland site, many times the area of the park itself, to the banks' company. The National Bank of Egypt held the larger share of the asset-management company and Banque Misr the smaller. Ahmed Bahgat died in May 2021, aged 70, months before the transfer was finalised. Redevelopment plans Since acquiring the land, the banks' asset-management company has sought to profit from it through sale or joint development rather than by running the park. The Dreamland site has been the subject of investment schemes for two decades; an earlier public auction drew weak interest after members of parliament objected to selling land linked to Bahgat, and several large firms withdrew. By 2024 the company was dividing the land into parcels of 213, 108, and 81 feddan and offering them to developers under revenue-sharing terms of roughly 40% to the banks and 60% to the developer. In June 2025 a Saudi investor bid for 48 feddan to build an urban leisure project, one of several offers the company studied while planning to split the land into parcels for sale or joint development. These reports concerned the land as a whole and did not state what would become of the amusement park itself, which continued to operate. Rides and attractions The Bahgat Group describes five themed zones plus a children's area. Sada El Balad describes seven zones and puts the number of attractions at 48. Roller coasters The park's main thrill ride is a Vekoma Suspended Looping Coaster (SLC), model 765m Standard with Helix, designed by Peter Clerx. It stands 33.3 m (109 ft) tall, reaches 80 km/h (50 mph), and delivers five inversions over a 765 m (2,510 ft) course. It was built to run two trains of ten cars, seating twenty riders each. Its English name is simply "Roller Coaster", while the Arabic sign reads القطار المعلق (al-qiṭār al-muʿallaq, "the suspended coaster"). Visitors and the press know it by the colloquial nickname قطار الموت (qiṭār al-mawt, "train of death"), which the park never adopted. The park has two further coasters, a family coaster and one classed as an indoor dark ride. Other rides Sada El Balad lists the park's best-known attractions as the Discovery (ديسكفري), the Rocket (الصاروخ), the Waterfall (الشلال), the Tornado (التورنادو), the House of Horror (بيت الرعب), a car rally (رالي السيارات), the Royal Car (السيارة الملكية), and the Chain (السلسلة), a chain swing tower. Entertainment and characters The park created its own mascot characters to appeal to Egyptian visitors, drawing on Arab folklore with figures such as Juha and Marjana, Al-Shater Hassan, and Ali Baba, two pharaonic characters named Tut and Tuta, and a character called Dubi that became its main emblem on tickets and the entrance gate. Over its history the park has hosted concerts by Egyptian and Arab singers, among them Mohamed Fouad, Ramy Gamal, Bosy, and Saad El Soghayar. Admission Admission uses a tiered ticket bought at the gate, giving unlimited access to most rides, with some rides charged separately. Prices have risen steeply with Egyptian inflation over the park's history. Reception For its first decade the park drew large, steady crowds and served as the model for the Egyptian amusement sector. By 2019 Invest-Gate reported that Dream Park was "not flourishing like old times", citing a decline in product quality and a loss of momentum, and framed it as a cautionary example for later Egyptian operators such as Makadi Water World and Africa Safari Park. Pieter Cornelis, a lecturer in theme-park economics at Fontys University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands, argued that operating a park over decades is a harder discipline than building one, and that cutting spending on themed detail to ease early costs undermines a park's long-term appeal. Scholars of Cairo's urban development have read the park as the public-facing part of an otherwise exclusive project. Elsheshtawy compares Dreamland to Heliopolis, the early-twentieth-century suburb built by Baron Empain, which also used an amusement park, Luna Park, to draw people to a foreign-styled development. In both of these ventures the theme park served as the social magnet for the wider scheme. He also notes that the residential compound's property prices excluded the poor from living there. Reviewers have noted a gap between the park's scale and its upkeep. The theme-park writer Stefan Zwanzger, who visited in 2010, praised the setting near the pyramids but described sloppiness in ride safety, including staff ignoring riders who stood up on the flume ride and a chain carousel that felt insecure. He also recorded the park's name misspelled as "Drem Park" on a staff uniform. Describing the atmosphere in the park, he wrote about it positively: Egyptians know how to laugh. Some even dance in the park. That's the true attraction. Incidents Two deaths at the park have been reported by Egyptian media. In August 2012, a child died after a golf cart struck him in the head while he waited in line for a ride. The park's manager, Sherif Sadeq, publicly denied that the park bore responsibility, also stating it had well-equipped medical clinics on site. In May 2024, a 22-year-old woman died after losing consciousness while riding the park's Vekoma suspended coaster, the ride popularly called قطار الموت ("train of death"). Reports attributed the death to cardiac arrest brought on by fear and stated that the operator stopped the ride as soon as she lost consciousness. The public prosecutor investigated and authorised burial. See also Dreamland, Egypt Ahmed Bahgat Notes References