Mediterranean Harbor
| Mediterranean Harbor | |
|---|---|
| Park | Tokyo DisneySea |
| Land / area | Mediterranean Harbor |
| Type | Themed port |
| Opened | September 4, 2001 |
| Designer | Walt Disney Imagineering
|
| Status | Operating |
Mediterranean Harbor is the entrance themed port at Tokyo DisneySea at Tokyo Disney Resort in Urayasu, Chiba, Japan. Presented as Porto Paradiso, a fictional Italian port town of harbourside streets, canals and a fortress, it performs the role Main Street, U.S.A. plays at a castle park: every guest enters through it, and its broad lagoon serves as the stage for the park's harbour shows. Uniquely among Disney entrance lands, the buildings around it include a working hotel, Tokyo DisneySea Hotel MiraCosta, whose guests look directly into the park.
History
Mediterranean Harbor opened with Tokyo DisneySea on September 4, 2001, as the first of the park's seven original ports and the gateway to the six beyond it.[1] Hotel MiraCosta opened the same day, built into the port's architecture so that the town and the hotel read as a single place. The hotel has 502 guest rooms divided between its Tuscany Side, Venice Side and Porto Paradiso Side, with the Porto Paradiso harbour-view rooms facing the lagoon and its shows.[2] Hotel guests enter the park through a dedicated entrance beneath the hotel.
For its first eighteen years the port had no major ride beyond its gondolas, fortress and steamer dock. That changed on July 23, 2019, when Soaring: Fantastic Flight opened in the hills above the harbour, immediately becoming one of the park's most popular attractions.[3]
Attractions
- Soaring: Fantastic Flight — Tokyo's version of Soarin' Around the World, housed in the Museum of Fantastic Flight, a museum honouring the dream of flight and the fictional aviator Camellia Falco, a member of the Society of Explorers and Adventurers. The flight simulator carries guests over famous landscapes around the world, with breezes and scents matched to the scenes, and includes imagery created for Tokyo.[4]
- Venetian Gondolas — gondoliers row guests through the Palazzo Canals on an approximately 11.5-minute cruise, with sixteen guests per gondola. The gondolas pause operation while harbour shows are being set up and performed.[5]
- Fortress Explorations — a walk-through fortress on the west side of the harbour, free to explore. Inside are a Foucault pendulum, an observatory, flying machines, an alchemy laboratory, a navigation centre and a hall of explorers, and the full-size sailing ship Renaissance is docked outside. The fortress is the headquarters of the Society of Explorers and Adventurers (S.E.A.), a fictional society founded, in its backstory, in 1538 — a storyline later picked up by attractions in other Disney parks.[6]
- DisneySea Transit Steamer Line — steamers depart the harbour dock for Lost River Delta and American Waterfront, giving the port a working transport link as well as a scenic cruise.
Description
The town is built as a collage of Italian coastal architecture: a piazza and harbourfront palazzi, a Venetian canal district, and the fortress rising against the slopes of Mount Prometheus, which forms the backdrop across the water. Magellan's, the table-service restaurant inside the fortress, and its lounge are among the park's most formal dining rooms, while Ristorante di Canaletto serves Italian food along the canals.
Because the lagoon is the park's largest open water, Mediterranean Harbor hosts DisneySea's waterborne entertainment, including the nighttime spectacular Believe! Sea of Dreams, performed on the harbour in front of the Hotel MiraCosta. During shows the piazza and harbour steps become the park's main viewing areas, and the gondolas and steamers give way to the performance barges.