Disney Hotel Santa Fe
Disney Hotel Santa Fe is a hotel at Disneyland Paris in Marne-la-Vallée, France, themed to the American Southwest, Route 66 and the Disney·Pixar film Cars. It opened on April 12, 1992, as one of the hotels that opened with the resort, then called Euro Disney, and as a two-star hotel it is the least expensive of the resort's full hotels. It was formerly known as Disney's Hotel Santa Fe, before the resort dropped the possessive from its hotel names.[1][2]
History
Santa Fe was designed by Antoine Predock, an architect based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, whose work is rooted in the American Southwest. Predock gave the hotel the form of a roadside motel town in Pueblo Revival style: low, flat-roofed blocks in ochre and terracotta, with the stepped masses and deep-set openings of adobe architecture, set in a deliberately spare desert landscape of sand, rock and cacti.
The hotel opened with Euro Disney in April 1992 under a general Southwestern and Route 66 theme; the entrance was originally marked by a large screen in the manner of an American drive-in. From 2011 the hotel was progressively rethemed to Cars, which had been released in 2006 and is itself set in a desert town on Route 66. The drive-in screen came to show Lightning McQueen and Sally, the facades gained illuminated outlines of the film's characters in 2012 and 2013, and the rooms were redecorated around the films.
Layout and theme
The hotel's 1,000 rooms are arranged in low-rise blocks grouped into sections named for Cars characters, including Lightning McQueen, Mater, Luigi and Sally, with room doors carrying Route 66-style badges for the section's character. Paths between the blocks are laid out like desert roads, with road markings, cacti and traffic signs carrying the road-trip idea through the grounds.
Room decoration follows the same theme in a deliberately simple, motel-like register appropriate to the hotel's price: Cars bedspreads, lamps shaped like traffic cones, borders of American licence plates and chequered-flag details. Rooms have ceiling fans rather than air conditioning, and the hotel has no swimming pool — the two clearest signs of its position at the budget end of the range.
Dining and amenities
La Cantina, the hotel's buffet restaurant, is styled as a Santa Fe street market and serves breakfast and an all-you-can-eat Tex-Mex dinner. The Rio Grande Bar serves drinks in a Southwestern setting, and there is a Starbucks coffee shop by reception.
Santa Fe stands on one side of the man-made Rio Grande river, with Disney Hotel Cheyenne on the other; the two hotels are linked by a bridge and share a walking route of about twenty minutes along the river to Disney Village and the park entrances, as well as the resort's free shuttle buses. Like the other Disney hotels, Santa Fe gives its guests access to the parks during Extra Magic Time.