Adventureland (Disneyland)
Adventureland is one of the five original lands of Disneyland Park at the Disneyland Resort in Anaheim, California, opened with the park on July 17, 1955. It lies to the southwest of the Central Plaza hub, between Main Street, U.S.A. and New Orleans Square. Its setting is a composite of the tropical regions of Asia, Africa, South America and the South Pacific as imagined by mid-twentieth-century America, drawing on the popularity of Walt Disney's True-Life Adventures nature films and on the post-war tiki culture then fashionable in the United States. Dense planting gives the land a jungle canopy quite unlike the open streets elsewhere in the park.
History
Adventureland was at first planned as "True-Life Adventureland", a setting drawn directly from the True-Life Adventures documentary series, and Walt Disney initially hoped to stock its river with live animals before accepting that they would be uncooperative and largely asleep. On opening day the land had a single attraction, the Jungle Cruise, together with a handful of shops including the Adventureland Bazaar. The river itself was the land's landscape: a winding waterway, designed with the help of art director Harper Goff, around which everything else was arranged.
The land grew in the early 1960s. The Swiss Family Treehouse, a walk-through based on the 1960 film Swiss Family Robinson, opened in 1962, and the Tahitian Terrace restaurant followed the same year. In 1963 Walt Disney's Enchanted Tiki Room opened near the entrance; it was the first attraction anywhere to use Disney's Audio-Animatronics technology, with a cast of singing birds, flowers and tiki figures. The Tiki Room was originally planned as a restaurant and was owned personally by Walt Disney through his own company for some years.
For three decades after that the land changed little. Aladdin's Oasis, a dining and storytelling venue, replaced the Tahitian Terrace in 1993, and in 1995 Indiana Jones Adventure: Temple of the Forbidden Eye opened — a large dark ride built in a show building outside the park's berm. Making room for its queue required the Jungle Cruise river to be re-routed and shortened, and the whole land was re-dressed toward a 1930s setting to match the period of the Indiana Jones films. The Swiss Family Treehouse was reworked as Tarzan's Treehouse in 1999 and reimagined again as the Adventureland Treehouse, inspired by the Swiss Family Robinson, in 2023.
Attractions
The Jungle Cruise remains the land's founding attraction: a boat tour of the great rivers of three continents, steered by a skipper whose commentary, at first played straight, evolved over the early 1960s — with input from animator Marc Davis — into the pun-laden routine now associated with the ride. The attraction was substantially revised in 2021, with new scenes and a storyline built around a stranded expedition.
Walt Disney's Enchanted Tiki Room presents a musical show of more than 200 Audio-Animatronic performers in a Polynesian longhouse, hosted by four parrots. Indiana Jones Adventure sends riders in troop-transport vehicles through a ruined temple, past effects including a rolling boulder, in pursuit of the archaeologist of the film series. The Adventureland Treehouse offers a climbable tree dwelling assembled from the salvaged timbers of a shipwreck.
Dining and shops
The Bengal Barbecue serves grilled skewers opposite the Indiana Jones entrance, while the Tropical Hideaway, opened in 2018 in the former Aladdin's Oasis space, serves Dole Whip — the soft-serve dessert also sold at the Tiki Juice Bar beside the Tiki Room. The Adventureland Bazaar and neighbouring shops sell clothing and goods in keeping with the land's tropical setting.