Walt Disney World

Walt Disney World Resort
Location	Lake Buena Vista and Bay Lake, Florida, United States
Opened	October 1, 1971
Area	Approximately 25,000 acres (about 40 square miles)
Owner	The Walt Disney Company
Operator	Disney Experiences
Status	Operating

The Walt Disney World Resort, commonly known as Walt Disney World or Disney World, is an entertainment resort complex in Bay Lake and Lake Buena Vista, Florida, United States. Owned and operated by Disney Experiences, a division of The Walt Disney Company, it covers approximately 25,000 acres — roughly the size of San Francisco — and contains four theme parks, two water parks, more than 25 resort hotels, golf courses, a shopping and dining district, and its own internal transport network of monorails, buses, boats and gondolas.

The resort was conceived by Walt Disney in the 1960s as a far larger companion to Disneyland in California, one that would add an experimental city of the future to the theme park he had already pioneered. Walt Disney died in December 1966, before construction began; his brother Roy O. Disney oversaw the first phase and insisted the Florida resort carry Walt's full name. It opened on October 1, 1971, with a single park, Magic Kingdom, and has been expanded in every decade since. It is the most visited vacation resort in the world.

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History

The Florida Project

By the early 1960s, Walt Disney had concluded that Disneyland's single park, hemmed in by the motels and businesses that sprang up around it in Anaheim, could never grow into the larger ideas he had for it. Beginning in 1963, Disney scouts quietly scouted the eastern United States for land. Central Florida was chosen for its climate, its highway junctions near Orlando, and the availability of huge tracts of cheap swampland and cattle pasture.

Through a web of dummy corporations with names such as the Latin-American Development and Management Corporation and the Reedy Creek Ranch Corporation, the company assembled about 27,000 acres for roughly five million dollars before the Orlando Sentinel uncovered the buyer's identity in October 1965. Walt Disney announced the project publicly on November 15, 1965. At the heart of his plans was EPCOT, the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow — a real, functioning city of 20,000 residents that would test new ideas in urban living.

Construction and opening

Walt Disney died on December 15, 1966. His brother Roy, who had retired, returned to lead the company and directed that the Florida project be completed, with the theme park — rather than the city — built first as the proven revenue engine. Roy renamed the resort Walt Disney World so that, in his words, everyone would know it was Walt's dream.

Construction employed some 9,000 workers. Seven Seas Lagoon was dug out in front of the park and its excavated earth used to raise the Magic Kingdom site by roughly 14 feet, allowing service corridors — the famous utilidors — to run beneath the park at ground level. The resort opened on October 1, 1971, with Magic Kingdom, Disney's Contemporary Resort, Disney's Polynesian Village Resort, and a campground that became Disney's Fort Wilderness Resort a month later. Roy O. Disney dedicated the resort and died less than three months later, in December 1971.

Expansion

A second park, EPCOT Center, opened on October 1, 1982, translating Walt's city concept into a permanent world's fair of technology and international culture. A third, Disney-MGM Studios (now Disney's Hollywood Studios), followed on May 1, 1989, and a fourth, Disney's Animal Kingdom, on April 22, 1998. Water parks arrived with River Country in 1976 (closed in 2001), Typhoon Lagoon in 1989 and Blizzard Beach in 1995. The Downtown Disney retail district, opened in 1975, was rebuilt and renamed Disney Springs in 2015.

The resort's land was governed from 1967 by the Reedy Creek Improvement District, a special district controlled by Disney that provided municipal services. Following a dispute with the State of Florida, the district was restructured in 2023 as the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District, with its board appointed by the governor.

Theme parks

• Magic Kingdom (1971) — the flagship park, modelled on Disneyland's layout, with Cinderella Castle at its centre.
• EPCOT (1982) — a celebration of technology and world cultures, symbolised by the Spaceship Earth geodesic sphere.
• Disney's Hollywood Studios (1989) — a park themed to cinema and television, home to Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge and Toy Story Land.
• Disney's Animal Kingdom (1998) — a zoological theme park centred on the Tree of Life, including Pandora – The World of Avatar.

Transportation

Guests move around the resort without charge on one of the largest private transport systems in the world: a monorail network linking Magic Kingdom, EPCOT and several hotels; a fleet of several hundred buses; water launches and ferries across Seven Seas Lagoon and Bay Lake; and, since 2019, the Disney Skyliner gondola system connecting EPCOT, Hollywood Studios and four resorts.

See also

• Disneyland Resort
• Magic Kingdom
• EPCOT
• Reedy Creek Improvement District
• ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex
• RunDisney
• Virtual queue