Construction walls block most of the views of the new Tropical Americas area in Disney’s Animal Kingdom, but our favorite eye in the sky has a new look at the progress on the Encanto ride building. We’re excited for this new dark ride, so let’s take a look!
Friend of the blog @bioreconstruct captured several great pictures of what’s being done on the Encanto ride, including a fascinating view of some deep concrete forms.
Above we can see a large retaining wall and a deep pit with some concrete forms. This really helps put the scale of the Encanto ride building into perspective. It’s big! We can’t make too many assumptions here, but we really hope this will be a long dark ride with great capacity. That kind of addition would really help round out Animal Kingdom’s roster of attractions.
Zooming out a bit, we can see just how much space the Encanto area of the Tropical Americas land will take up. The ride pushed out the existing boundary of Animal Kingdom and is almost up against a backstage road.
While the ride is still in the early phases of construction, we know it’s a dark ride that will take guests through Casita on the day Antonio receives his gift to speak to animals. That’s about all we know. Disney hasn’t released many details, and still haven’t even officially named the Encanto ride. Reports have suggested guests will visit Antonio’s room during the ride, and that room will be one of the largest set pieces in the attraction.
As sad as we have been to see DinoLand USA close and get demolished, we’re extremely excited for this Encanto ride. Animal Kingdom needs a good dark ride, and the Encanto attraction is essentially replacing an off-the-shelf coaster in Primeval Whirl. We consider that a win even though it’s tough to see DINOSAUR and Restaurantosaurus go. Construction on the Tropical Americas will really kick into high gear when DINOSAUR closes in February 2026.
The Encanto ride along with the rest of the Tropical Americas land is expected to open in 2027.
