Tropical Americas: Disney’s New Animal Kingdom Land, Targeting 2027

The Cementosaurus is gone. The big roadside dinosaur that leaned over DinoLand U.S.A. for a quarter century came down in March 2025, and if you stand roughly where it stood today, you’ll see wooden roof trusses climbing over a steel carousel frame in the Florida heat. That carousel is the exciting sign. It means Tropical Americas, the land Disney unveiled at D23 in August 2024, is growing from concept art into a real place.

Here’s what Disney shared when the concept art first went up. Eleven acres of Animal Kingdom, rethemed from the former dinosaur midway into a town called Pueblo Esperanza, a village pitched somewhere between the highlands of Colombia and the ruins of Central America. There will be a sprawling hacienda doing duty as one of the largest quick-service restaurants on the whole resort. A central fountain where villagers gather to swap stories. And that carousel, hand-carved by a village woodcarver and populated with Disney animals rather than horses. It’s a wonderfully detailed vision. Two years on, the fountain and the hacienda footprints are in the ground and the carousel is the piece going vertical first.

The reason anyone’s watching, though, is the two headliners. One is an Indiana Jones ride-through, and it is its own distinct experience rather than a repeat of the tram over at Disneyland. Indy has stumbled onto a perfectly preserved Maya temple, and you go in with him chasing rumors of a mythical creature hidden inside. The other is the one that made people sit up. It is the first Encanto attraction Disney has ever built, anywhere. You step into the Madrigals’ casita for the moment young Antonio gets his gift and finds he can talk to animals, and his bedroom blooms into a full rainforest around you. For a movie that grossed what it did and stayed on the streaming charts, fans have been eager for this, and now it’s the emotional center of the land.

What sets this project apart from the rest of the D23 2024 slate is small and enormous at once. It got a year. Disney shared a lot of blue-sky ideas that week and attached almost none of them to a calendar, and Tropical Americas got 2027, out loud, and it has kept it. As recently as April 30, 2026, on its own blog, Disney reaffirmed the 2027 window and walked through the research behind the design, including Imagineering trips to Honduras and Colombia to get the architecture and the materials right. That is the kind of detail that shows real confidence in the project.

How much is standing today

More than you’d guess. DinoLand closed and was cleared in phases across 2025, concrete torn up, walls knocked down, the carnival games removed. Vertical construction is well underway. By late July 2026, wood roof trusses were going up around the carousel’s steel frame in a two-tier canopy with hand-hewn beams and a scalloped edge, and a queue building was rising alongside it with its own steel canopy. The Indiana Jones facade and the Encanto casita foundation have both been photographed taking shape. This land is well past its groundbreaking and moving steadily toward the finish.

One detail worth understanding lives in the paperwork. Over the summer, Disney filed a permit extension covering set installation on the Indiana Jones ride, with work authorized through April 2027, and that was enough to spawn a round of “major delay” headlines. Read the permits closely and the picture is calmer. Extensions like these are routine on a build this size, nothing has been officially pushed, and Disney has kept its public timeline. If anything, permits expiring by April 2027 point toward the land wrapping in spring and a possible summer 2027 opening. Disney hasn’t named a month, and until it does, the year is the target, and that target is holding steady.

The momentum here is easy to celebrate. The dinosaur came down, the casita is going up, and the number Disney said in 2024 is the same number Disney is saying now. The next twelve months will carry the land toward completion, and those are the months worth watching.

The latest

We’re tracking this one live, and we’ll update it the moment anything shifts, including whatever Disney reveals about Tropical Americas at D23 2026.

This is part of our live tracker of every new land and ride Disney announced at D23 2024. See where all eleven stand: D23 2026, live: every Disney parks reveal, and the latest on what is coming.

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Live updates

[Aug 14, 4:13 p.m. PT] At the Imagineering: Horizons pavilion on Day 1, Disney gave a first look at Tropical Americas, including an Encanto attraction with Audio-Animatronics figures, a temple facade model for its Indiana Jones attraction, and four character sculpts for the land’s carousel.