Montu

Three years after Kumba's success, Busch Gardens Tampa Bay committed to its largest single investment to date: a 7-acre Egypt land built specifically around a new Bolliger & Mabillard inverted coaster. Announced August 23, 1995, the plan paired the ride with a walk-through King Tut's tomb attraction and desert-ruins theming rather than simply dropping a coaster into existing scenery. The park named the ride Montu that October, after the falcon-headed Egyptian war god, and it opened to the public on May 16, 1996.

Montu's design pushed the inverted-coaster format further than any B&M had before — a 150-foot lift and a first-of-its-kind Immelmann loop launch trains through seven inversions at 60 mph across 3,980 feet of track, with sections of the layout carved into trenches below grade so the structure could clear height restrictions near the park's flight path. At its debut, Montu held the world record as the tallest and fastest inverted coaster, a title it would hold until B&M's own Alpengeist opened at Busch Gardens Williamsburg the following year.

The ride's Egypt setting has aged into one of the park's most complete themed lands, with queue switchbacks winding past temple facades and hieroglyph-covered walls that still frame the ride nearly three decades later.

Montu remains a perennial entry in national top-10 coaster rankings and, alongside Kumba, anchors Busch Gardens Tampa's Egypt section as one of the park's two elder-statesman steel coasters.