Walt Disney World Resort

After the success of his California park, Walt Disney grew frustrated that he had not controlled the land around it, which quickly filled with unrelated hotels and shops. Determined not to repeat that, he set his sights on Florida, where cheap, undeveloped land was plentiful. In the mid-1960s his company secretly bought up a vast tract of swamp and pine flatwoods near Orlando through shell companies, so prices would not soar once his involvement became known.

Walt envisioned not just theme parks but an experimental planned community, a city of the future. He died in 1966, before construction was well underway, and the company scaled back the more radical city ideas, focusing first on a theme park and resort. The first park opened in 1971, and the resort has expanded steadily ever since into the multi-park destination of today.

The land Disney chose was largely low, wet, and unsuited to building, and transforming it was a monumental feat of engineering. Crews dug an extensive network of canals and levees to control the water, drained and raised low ground, and created lakes and waterways, reshaping the landscape before the first attraction rose. Much of the earth moved to build the resort came from digging its lagoons.

The company also secured an unusual degree of self-government over its land, allowing it to build and manage the sprawling infrastructure of roads, utilities, and services that a resort of this scale requires. What had been a mostly empty corner of Central Florida became, in effect, a purpose-built district devoted entirely to the resort, an early and dramatic example of large-scale planned development on former wetlands.

At the heart of the resort is its original theme park, with the fairy-tale castle that has become one of the most recognized icons in the world, organized into themed lands of fantasy, adventure, and nostalgic Americana. Over the decades the company added more theme parks, each with a distinct theme, from the future and world cultures to the movies and the natural world, along with water parks and a large dining and entertainment district.

The scale is what sets Walt Disney World apart. Rather than a single park, it is a constellation of them, surrounded by dozens of hotels ranging from modest to lavish, connected by monorails, boats, and buses. Families plan entire vacations around it, often without ever leaving the property, moving among the parks and resorts over the course of a week or more.

Before Disney arrived, Central Florida was a region of citrus groves, cattle ranches, and quiet towns, with Orlando a modest inland city. The opening of the resort in 1971 changed everything, drawing millions of visitors and spurring an explosion of hotels, attractions, restaurants, and highways across the region, and eventually a rival theme park empire nearby.

Today the area around Orlando is the busiest vacation destination in the world, and Walt Disney World is its cornerstone. The resort's success reshaped the economy and landscape of Central Florida and set the template for the modern destination resort. For all the parks that have followed, it remains the largest and the most visited, a vacation world of its own raised from Florida wetlands.

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