Teenagers may be a strain on parents, but their difficult age brings a blessing if you live in, or travel to, Paris: they are now too cool to be seen dead in Disneyland or Parc Astérix. When my two were younger, I endured the torture of visits to the two grim leisure factories on the city outskirts.

With its 14 million annual visitors, the year-round Disney machine at Marne la Vallée is a giant beside the plastic Gaullish village, just north of Charles de Gaulle airport, which draws 1.7 million for its spring-to-autumn season. The pair serve up similar fare: you pay a fortune to queue for hours with thousands of tourists eating chips and ice-cream to experience thrills that last sometimes no more than a minute.

There is nothing more miserable than shivering in the drizzle in a sea of anoraks and leather jackets, shuffling by those little signs that tell you that you have only 45 minutes before your turn on the magic mountain or water slide. Disney, which has made little money for its shareholders since its 1992 opening, has just inaugurated a new €100million “tower of terror” in which you queue for an hour or two to drop 56m in a simulated 1930s lift shaft.

For this and the pleasures of being greeted by fatuous Mickey Mice and Donald Ducks you pay €212 (about £160) entry for a couple with two children. That's before you spend anything on food and souvenirs, which are monstrously overpriced, unless you are prepared to eat junk food. Disney is proud to tell you that more people visit its park than the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre combined. Most of its customers are not French.

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The British flock more than any other foreigners to taste the delights of this imitation America, followed by Low Countries citizens and the Spanish. With so many lovely sites of their own, the French were rightly shocked when President Sarkozy chose Disneyland as the venue for his first public outing with Carla Bruni, the Italian model whom he married last month.

Over at Astérix, which opened in 1989, the ambiance is not quite so grim, if only because its scale is smaller and 90 per cent of its visitors are French or Belgian. The Astérix park is more bearable because of its rustic air. Buried in the woods near the A1 motorway, it does not have the overpowering feel of the slick Disney machine, with its megabucks special effects and merchandising.

The biggest attraction, the Tonnerre de Zeus, is Europe's biggest rollercoaster built on an all-wood structure. More suited for children is the boat trip that ends with Le Grand Splatch, a drop down a waterfall.

But the queues are still enormous in summer and a family of four pays E128 just to get in to the make-believe Gaullish village to start forking out more on souvenirs and refreshments. Enjoy it now if you must because Astérix, which has actually made a profit for most of its existence, unlike Disneyland, has big plans to expand and attract tourists from beyond the frontiers of Gaul.

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