Les Mystères du Nautilus
| Les Mystères du Nautilus | |
|---|---|
| Park | Disneyland Park (Paris) |
| Land / area | Discoveryland |
| Type | Walk-through attraction |
| Opened | July 4, 1994 |
| Designer | Walt Disney Imagineering |
| Height req. | None |
| Status | Operating |
Les Mystères du Nautilus is a walk-through attraction in Discoveryland at Disneyland Park (Paris) at Disneyland Paris. Guests board Captain Nemo's submarine, the Nautilus, as recreated from Disney's 1954 film 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, itself adapted from Jules Verne's novel, and tour its rooms at their own pace. It opened on July 4, 1994, in the Discoveryland lagoon beside the mountain built for Space Mountain.[1]
History
The idea is older than the park. When Disneyland in California opened in 1955, a walk-through exhibit was assembled at short notice from sets and props from the 1954 film, and it showed guests the Nautilus interiors until 1966. For Paris, the Imagineers designing Discoveryland — a land dedicated to Verne, Leonardo da Vinci and other visionaries in place of Tomorrowland — decided to recreate that exhibit properly, as a full submarine rather than a set of rooms in a show building.
The Nautilus was originally meant to sit inside the much larger Discovery Mountain complex, alongside the Space Mountain coaster. When that project was cut back, the submarine was moved outside into its own lagoon, where the riveted hull still sits at the water's edge. Imagineer Tom Scherman, a lifelong Nautilus enthusiast who had modelled the submarine for years, worked on the Paris recreation under Discoveryland show producer Tim Delaney; the attraction opened the summer before Space Mountain itself, completing the land's Verne pairing a year early.
Because it is a walk-through with no vehicles, the attraction was always vulnerable in an era of headline rides, and it spent a long period closed in the early 2020s. It reopened in July 2023 after a substantial refurbishment that renewed lighting, effects, controls and sound, and introduced new underwater scenes — at the cost of its most famous effect, discussed below.[2]
Experience
Guests enter through a small structure by the lagoon and descend a spiral staircase, in story terms boarding the submarine below the surface. The tour then passes through six principal rooms. The ballast compartment comes first, holding a chest of the treasure Nemo has amassed on his voyages, with Ned Land's guitar resting on the gold in a nod to the film. The captain's cabin, with its bed, bathroom and personal effects, and the chart room follow; the chart room's maps include Vulcania, Nemo's secret island base in the film, and stairs rise toward a wheelhouse guests cannot enter.
Next is the diving chamber, an airlock lined with diving suits around a hatch in the floor that opens onto the seabed. The centrepiece is the grand salon: a museum room of marine specimens, books, paintings and treasure, dominated at one end by Nemo's pipe organ — in whose mirror the captain's reflection periodically appears. A large porthole in the salon was, from 1994, the site of the attraction's climax, an attack by a giant squid whose animatronic tentacles pressed against the glass. The 2023 refurbishment removed the squid, and the window now shows projected scenes of passing marine life, including sharks and whales. The tour ends in the engine room, among pistons, levers and electrical machinery, before guests climb back to the surface and the Discoveryland midway.[3]