Hotel Review: El Paso Hotel, PortAventura, Spain
This post was last reviewed and edited on 06/11/2025 to include the most up-to-date hotel information and prices
Thinking of visiting PortAventure and wondering which hotel you should choose? We’ve stayed in three of the PortAventura hotels so far, and this is our review of the El Paso Hotel in PortAventura.
Yes, it’s another theme park post! This time it’s a 7-night stay in the PortAventura El Paso Hotel, and visit the three parks that make up the resort. These are the PortAventura theme park, the Ferrari Land theme park and the Caribe Aquatic Park (that’s a water park to you and I!)
We’ve written before about how much we love PortAventura: But what did we think of the hotel?
- Staying At The El Paso Hotel, PortAventura
- Booking The PortAventura El Paso Hotel
- Visiting Ferrari Land in PortAventura During Our Stay
- The Caribe Aquatic Park in PortAventura
- An Overview of PortAventura Park
- Is The El Paso Hotel In PortAventura Worth It?
Heads up! This post may contain affiliate links, which means if you click and make a purchase, I might earn a very small commission – at no extra cost to you. This helps to keep the blog going. Thanks for the support
Staying At The El Paso Hotel, PortAventura
We stayed in the El Paso Hotel, which is a four star hotel that is owned by PortAventura and is situated on their property. (It takes approximately 10 minutes to walk to the parks from the hotel).
This hotel is closer to the park than the Caribe hotel, which we have also visited (you can read our review of that park here) so if proximity to the PortAventura park is one of your concerns, that gives the El Paso Hotel a big tick.
The hotel El Paso is also the only All-Inclusive PortAventura hotel: our package included Breakfast in the main buffet dining room each day, dinner in the same buffet dining room every day BUT we were also allowed to have dinner one day in the Italian a la carte restaurant.
There were three options for lunch: You could have lunch in the main dining room. You could have lunch from the poolside snack bar (this included normal poolside food such as burgers, salads, and pizzas). Or the best option if you wanted busy theme park days was to ask at reception for a meal voucher, which entitled you to a main meal from one of the restaurants inside any of the PortAventura theme parks.
We went with option three almost every day and this was incredibly good value: the voucher enabled you to select a three-course menu and a large soft drink from any of the ‘quick service’ restauants and meant that we didn’t have to waste time leaving the park to get lunch. If you want to eat in a fancier sit down restaurant then the vouchers are worth 20 euros per adult and 9.50 euros per child. You can use these towards a meal in an a la carte restaurant and have anything you want!
Because PortAventura El Paso is an all-inclusive hotel, you could also get alcoholic and non alcoholic drinks all day and night, but only when you were in the hotel (we wasted this benefit a lot, as we spent most of our days in the park).
Park tickets for the PortAventura park are included for every day of your stay, and you also get one day ticket to Ferrari Land. If you want to go to the water park, tickets for this can be purchased from the hotel reception. These are subsidised (and therefore cheaper than buying from anywhere else). We paid approximately 20 euros per ticket, and we visited the water park for two days of our stay.
The El Paso hotel offered evening entertainment and regular character meet and greets, with minimal queues. This was such a highlight for the children (especially the youngest, who was just turned 4 at this point, and Sesame Street crazy!)
Booking The PortAventura El Paso Hotel
You can book this hotel via Klook, and your hotel stay includes unlimited access to PortAventura Park and one day’s access to Ferrari Land. This is BY FAR the cheapest way to visit (to do it DIY) by booking this and your flights separately. If we’d known this option was available, we would definitely have done this to save some money. Especially with my discount code, which gives even more money off! Prices are currently £98 per night for this week, but of course vary depending on the season and number of people per room.
👉 Book the EL Paso Hotel With unlimited access to PortAventura Park and one day’s access to Ferrari Land here to save money
🎁 Use code THATMUMTRAVEL5KLOOK to get an extra 5% off (and Klook currently have a limited time 10% offer for first time users)
We booked this trip as a package with TUI. Although this was considerably more experience, it was convenient because it included our flights and airport transfers too. We don’t usually opt for package holidays, but we did enjoy the convenience.
Visiting Ferrari Land in PortAventura During Our Stay
Ferrari Land is probably a park that is better suited to older children, teens, and adrenaline junkie adults: the thrill rides and rollercoasters in this park are insane! Having said that, they do have half a dozen child-friendly smaller rides and a junior rollercoaster. The ‘pit crew’ experience where you can see how fast you can change a tyre on an F1 car was a lot of fun. And my F1 and Ferrari mad 8 year old just loved wandering around the cars, sitting in them and experiencing the atmosphere of the place. For car geeks/enthusiasts, the Ferarri museum was fascinating, and my husband was super excited to be sitting in some of the most famous F1 winning cars.
I really liked the theming of this park; it was stylised to look like Italy, with the town squares and fountains. It was also organised really well for families, with all of the rides suitable for smaller children (those under 120cm) situated in the same area. This area was right by the stage, where we grabbed an ice cream and watched a pretty remarkable stunt show: think BMX bikers, par cour runners and acrobats. It was a small boy’s dream!
I would suggest that Ferrari Land is only a full day trip if you are going to join the queues for the larger roller coasters though: we entered as the park opened, and left in time to go and get our lunch in the main PortAventura park, having ridden all of the kid rides, explored the Ferrari museum, and all of the other walk-through experiences. We had the option to buy another days ticket, but we just didn’t feel the need to.
The Caribe Aquatic Park in PortAventura
I often joke that my boys should have been born with gills: we are a family of fish and we all love being in the water! In fact, even if we’re only booking a one or two night stay away, having a pool is on our ‘essential’ list for any hotel. The Caribe Aquatic park ticked all the boxes! Family slides, kids slides and huge almost-vertical thrill slides. A lazy river, wave pool, and selection of indoor and outdoor fun pools.
If I had one criticism then it would be that the height limits seemed overly cautious: aside from the kids structure pictured below, our youngest couldn’t go on any of the water slides, although he is such a thrill seeker that he was very keen to join his brother on some of the bigger slides. I understand that safety comes first, but it was definitely very frustrating for him.
We visited at the beginning of June and (it’s a cliché, but I know it’s something so many people worry about) we had absolutely no problem securing sun loungers every time that we went to the water park (and around the pool at the hotel too). We wanted loungers under some shade, to protect the boys from the heat of the sun at its hottest, but if you’re a sun worshipper then there were plenty of loungers for baking on too. In fact, you couldn’t move around the pools for loungers, so they clearly have plenty of capacity for when they’re really busy at the height of the summer!
An Overview of PortAventura Park
The PortAventura Park is almost like half a dozen different theme parks in one, thanks to the way that it is zoned into six different worlds. By far our favourite world (because of the ages of the boys) was Sesame Street land. It was bright, it was colourful, and it was fully immersive: you felt like you had walked straight onto Sesame Street.
The newest ride in Sesame Street Land (officially called Sesamo Aventura) is Street Mission. Whilst the queues for this could be pretty long at points (because it was the newest ride in the park) we just loved this: we wrote it twice a day when we could, and made riding it every time we were in the Port Aventura park our main mission!
Detective Grover is on a secret mission and to carry it out he needs the help of brave and fearless families: this is a 3D dark ride where you travel in a circular taxi cab and try to capture as many cookies as you can whilst helping Grover to solve the mystery, and save the day.
Portaventura have really excelled themselves with this ride, and although they are known for having some of Europe’s best roller coaster, this and the rest of the Sesamo Aventura area helps to cement this as a family park too.
That doesn’t mean we didn’t enjoy the other worlds too: in fact, the children’s rides are cleverly distributed so that there is at least one child-friendly ride in every land that you enter, and we enjoyed spending time in every single on of them.
Although I am a roller coaster junkie, because we had planned this to be a ‘family-focused’ holiday I didn’t take advantage of all the bigger rides on offer, but I did slip off to ride SHAMBHALA, which is the highest roller coaster in the park at 76 metres and also has the steepest drop. It was awesome: a truly incredible, exhilarating ride. If you’re a thrill seeker with an iron stomach to hop from coaster to coaster then I would suggest that Portaventura is the perfect theme park for you.
Is The El Paso Hotel In PortAventura Worth It?
I know the El Paso Hotel in Portaventura gets very mixed reviews. But we’ve now stayed in this hotel twice, and never had any complaints. The rooms are very basic, but they have enough room for a family of four with younger children. If you’re travelling with teens then I would suggest looking into getting two adjoining rooms, which they also offer.
We found the quality of the food in the main restaurant to be good and plentiful. The breakfast in particular was very good, but we also enjoyed our evening meals. Over 7 days this could have felt repeatative, but because we had the lunch vouchers and ate something different in the park every day we were very happy with the food.
Our one complaint? The pool was huge, and always quiet, but it wasn’t heated. This wouldn’t matter in the heat of the summer, but when we visited in May although the weather was hot the water was freezing. This definitely limited how much time the kids wanted to spend in the water, and would be a factor that would make us consider choosing another hotel next time.
👉 Book the EL Paso Hotel With unlimited access to PortAventura Park and one day’s access to Ferrari Land here to save money
🎁 Use code THATMUMTRAVEL5KLOOK to get an extra 5% off (and Klook currently have a limited time 10% offer for first time users)
Have you ever visited the El Paso Hotel in PortAventura? How did you find it? Do you have another PortAventura hotel you prefer or you would recommend that we try next time? I’d love to hear your thoughts!
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Heads up! This post may contain affiliate links, which means if you click and make a purchase, I might earn a very small commission – at no extra cost to you. This helps to keep the blog going. Thanks for the support!
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