How Big Are Disney World and Disneyland?

To many outside observers, the Disneyland Resort (located in Anaheim, California) and the Walt Disney World Resort (located near Orlando, Florida) are almost identical. Both feature main theme parks with a castle at the center and similar layouts, they share many of the same rides and attractions (Pirates of the Caribbean, The Haunted Mansion, ‘it’s a small world’, etc.), and both have on-property hotels and shopping districts.

However, under closer inspection, they couldn’t be more different in several major ways. Some attractions are specific to each coast, while even some of the ones that are “cloned” are actually quite different. However, the biggest — quite literal — difference is in size.

How Big is Disneyland?

When Walt Disney acquired the Anaheim orange groves that would become Disneyland in the early 1950s, he bought as much as he financially could. In fact, Walt was so strapped by the end of land purchasing that he didn’t have the funds to purchase land or construct his own hotel, instead granting the rights to what would become the Disneyland Hotel to his friend Jack Wrather.

While that did provide Walt with enough land to build the initial version of his dream theme park — as well as the backstage infrastructure necessary to run it — there wasn’t nearly enough to give the park breathing room from the massive influx of hotels, motels, and other tourist traps that exploded around the theme park in response to its success, immediately making Walt feel boxed in. Not only did it limit potential expansion options, as the land around the park sold before Disney had a chance to make a move, but this influx also upset Disney in two major ways.

The first and more practical was that these outside businesses were earning money from Disney guests, in-turn limiting the amount they had to spend at Disneyland. Secondly, and more thematically, the large amount of outside business encroaching around the park led to the outside world being visible from inside many areas of Disneyland, breaking the immersion and escapism that Walt and his team had worked so hard to construct.

Walt spoke of the space issue during the later years of his life, saying:

“The one thing I learned from Disneyland was to control the environment. Without that we get blamed for the things that someone else does. When they come here they’re coming because of an integrity that we’ve established over the years, and they drive for hundreds of miles and the little hotels on the fringe would jump their rates three times. I’ve seen it happen and I just can’t take it because, I mean, it reflects on us. I just feel a responsibility to the public when I go into this thing that we must control that, and when they come into this so-called world, that we will take the blame for what goes on.”

In the near seven decades since Disneyland opened, the Walt Disney Company has been able to acquire more land in Anaheim (including, eventually, the Disneyland Hotel). Currently, the Disneyland resort is made up of about 500 acres of land, within which Disney has built and maintained Disneyland (which has only continued to grow in the years since it opened), Disney’s California Adventure theme park (which opened to a tepid response in 2001, but has seen a significant boost in approval ratings since the park underwent a billion-plus dollar makeover in the late 2000s), three resort hotels (the aforementioned Disneyland Hotel, the Grand Californian Hotel, and the Paradise Pier Hotel, soon to be renamed the Pixar Place hotel), and the Downtown Disney shopping and dining district.

Disney is somewhat notorious for not releasing the exact capacity limits they set on their theme parks, however using various data points, we can roughly estimate the capacity numbers of each of the company’s theme parks.

For the Disneyland Resort, these numbers are approximately:

Disneyland: 85,000 Guests a day.
Disney’s California Adventure: 50,000 guests a day.

Walt Disney World

While Disney was able to maximize the amount of space available to them in Disneyland, Walt Disney wanted to ensure that the project he was working on during the last years of his life — the so-called “Florida Project” that he initially envisioned as being the EPCOT city of the future, and which would eventually become Walt Disney World — wouldn’t run into any of the space issues that plagued his original theme park. Walt led the company in acquiring over 27,000 acres of land (AKA larger than more than 50 Disneylands) through the use of shell company names to keep costs down.

Walt would say at the time, “Here in Florida, we have something special we never enjoyed at Disneyland…the blessing of size. There’s enough land here to hold all the ideas and plans we can possibly imagine.”

While Walt would not live to see construction of Walt Disney World begin, his insistence on purchasing as much land as possible has shaped the entire development of the Walt Disney World Resort. As of 2023, the complex features four theme parks (Magic Kingdom, EPCOT, Hollywood Studios, and Animal Kingdom ), two water parks (Blizzard Beach and Typhoon Lagoon), nearly 30 resort hotels, a massive shopping and dining district, several golf and mini-golf courses, and numerous other amenities — all with thousands of acres still undeveloped, some preserved for conservation purposes and some ready for future expansion and setting up a natural berm that isolates Walt Disney World from the outside world of Central Florida in a way fans of Disney World’s Southern California counterpart can only dream of.

With it’s larger size, one would presume that Walt Disney World’s theme parks would have approximate attendance capacity numbers that are larger than the Disneyland parks. Based on these numbers, they would be correct.

Magic Kingdom: 100,000 guests a day.
EPCOT: 95,000 guests a day.
Disney Hollywood Studios: 75,000 guests a day.
Disney’s Animal Kingdom: 55,000 guests a day.

Have you ever put much thought into the respective sizes of the Disneyland Resort and Walt Disney World. Do you prefer the smaller, arguably cozier but boxed in by the outside world Disneyland, or the larger than life but cut off from the outside world vibes of Walt Disney World? Let us know in the comments below.

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