Mexico Pavilion
| Mexico Pavilion | |
|---|---|
| Park | EPCOT |
| Land / area | World Showcase |
| Type | Pavilion |
| Opened | October 1, 1982
|
| Status | Operating |
The Mexico Pavilion is a pavilion in World Showcase at EPCOT at Walt Disney World, Florida. It is the first pavilion reached by visitors who turn left — clockwise — at Showcase Plaza, and stands between the entrance to World Showcase and the Norway Pavilion. The pavilion opened with the park on October 1, 1982, and is dominated by a stepped Mesoamerican pyramid, inside which a village plaza is held in permanent evening light.
Mexico was part of World Showcase planning from an early stage, although early layouts placed it on the opposite side of the lagoon, roughly where Canada now stands. Early design work also considered a more contemporary glass-walled building contrasting old and new Mexico; the scheme built instead looked to pre-Columbian architecture for its exterior. Mexican businesses, among them the operators of the San Ángel Inn restaurant in Mexico City and the Moctezuma brewery, contributed funding to the project.
Design
The pyramid draws on Mesoamerican precedents of around the third century AD and is commonly described as modelled on the Temple of Quetzalcoatl at Teotihuacan, with carved serpent heads and stepped terraces. It is a show building rather than a solid structure: visitors climb its entrance steps and pass inside to the Plaza de los Amigos, an interior courtyard dressed as a small-town Mexican market at twilight, complete with a fountain, balconies and market stalls selling glassware, ceramics, jewellery and clothing.
The twilight setting is deliberate. Lighting, a painted sky and a second, smaller pyramid silhouette in the distance keep the plaza in a fixed early-evening mood regardless of the Florida weather outside, a treatment shared with a handful of other Disney interiors of the period. Around the outside of the pyramid, gardens and the lagoon-front terrace belong to the pavilion's quick-service restaurant.
Attractions
The pavilion's only ride is the Gran Fiesta Tour Starring the Three Caballeros, a slow indoor boat ride boarding at the rear of the plaza. Boats pass the dining room of the San Ángel Inn before moving through scenes of Mexican landscapes, festivals and cities, many carried on screens, in which José Carioca and Panchito Pistoles search for Donald Duck ahead of a concert in Mexico City. Audio-Animatronic figures of the three characters, recovered from the former Mickey Mouse Revue, were added at the finale in 2015.
The ride opened with the pavilion in 1982 as El Rio del Tiempo (The River of Time), a gentler survey of Mexican history and culture from pre-Columbian times to the present. It closed on January 2, 2007, and reopened in its present form on April 6, 2007, reusing the same channel, boats and much of the original scenery beneath the new story.
Live entertainment has included mariachi performance on the pavilion steps, and the plaza's gallery spaces have hosted changing exhibits of Mexican folk art.
Dining
Dining has been central to the pavilion since opening day, when it had two restaurants. The San Ángel Inn Restaurante sits inside the pyramid at the water's edge of the boat ride, modelled on the Mexico City restaurant of the same name, whose own history reaches back to 1692. On the lagoon outside, La Cantina de San Ángel serves quick-service Mexican food from a terrace facing World Showcase Lagoon; its site was rebuilt and expanded in 2010, adding the table-service La Hacienda de San Ángel alongside it. A tequila bar, La Cava del Tequila, opened inside the pyramid in 2009.