Every time we walk past the construction walls where DinoLand U.S.A. used to be, there's a little less dinosaur and a little more magical realism peeking over the top. This month, that shift became impossible to ignore: Disney just filed the steel construction permit for the show building that will become the heart of the new Encanto ride, and the framework about to go up is going to change how this whole corner of Animal Kingdom looks from the pathway.
What's Actually Going Up Right Now
The Casita show building is roughly 60,000 square feet — just larger than a football field — and the poured concrete walls are already rising on top of a constructed berm. Two of those walls now carry green exterior paneling, the first real hint of finished texture on a structure that's spent the last year as bare concrete and rebar. The steel permit that just cleared is typically the next visible leap in a project like this: it's what carries the rockwork and gives a show building its final silhouette, so if you've been watching the walls, this is the milestone that tells you the Casita is about to start actually looking like a house instead of a foundation.
Disney's own description of the attraction, released earlier this year, confirmed the story beat everyone hoped for: guests arrive on the day Antonio receives his magical gift — the ability to talk to animals — and journey through the house in vehicles designed to look like the living, moving furniture from the film's most memorable sequence, the one where the Casita itself seems to breathe. You'll approach a full-scale recreation of the Madrigal family's home before boarding, which is exactly the kind of entrance Imagineering tends to save for a land's signature ride.
Why This Particular Milestone Matters
We've followed enough of these builds to know that two things tell you more about a real timeline than any speculative date floating around a fan forum: poured concrete and steel permits. Both boxes just got checked in the same season. Concrete tells you the structure's footprint is locked in. Steel tells you Disney is committing real money to the next phase rather than sitting on preliminary work. Seeing them land close together is usually the clearest external sign that a project has moved past foundation work and into its final shape.
The Land Growing Up Around It
The attraction is the centerpiece of Tropical Americas, the land absorbing the old DinoLand footprint — specifically the ground where Chester & Hester's Dino-Rama once stood, plus a parcel that used to be backstage. DINOSAUR and Restaurantosaurus closed for good back on February 2nd, and the area has been fully walled off from guests since the next morning. If you haven't been to Animal Kingdom since early this year, the change in that corner of the park is dramatic — where dinosaur carnival games used to be, there's now a rising concrete house straight out of a Colombian mountain village.
And the Casita isn't the only thing rising inside those walls. Tropical Americas is being built around a fictional village called Pueblo Esperanza, and the Encanto ride is just one of three attractions taking shape there. Disney is also repurposing DINOSAUR's existing ride system into a new Indiana Jones adventure — a third, non-cloned version of the ride with a storyline unique to Animal Kingdom — and a new carousel is going up alongside both of them. Recent construction photos show show-scene work already underway inside the old DINOSAUR building for the Indy reimagining, which tells us Disney is building this land as a genuine three-attraction expansion, not just a single replacement ride tacked onto a rebrand.
The Timeline (And Why Disney Isn't Rushing It)
Disney is still holding to a 2027 opening for Tropical Americas and the Encanto ride, without narrowing it down to a specific date yet. That's consistent with how Imagineering has approached other recent E-ticket builds — better a delayed opening than an attraction that breaks down every other week in its first year. For a park that's leaned hard on Pandora and Kilimanjaro Safaris to carry crowds for the better part of a decade, a new headliner themed to one of Disney's most beloved recent films is exactly the kind of investment Animal Kingdom has needed.
Are you more excited to finally see the Casita in person, or for the ride system itself? Tell us what you're hoping for in the comments — we'll keep watching the walls so you don't have to.