Tropical Americas

Most of these "guesses" are fairly self evident and I think we can be confident with the location of the main attractions and their associated queues. The playground is less obvious as it lacks a defined structure but this location makes a lot of sense for that purpose. Playground areas tend to have one narrow entry and exit point - so kids can be left to run around and parents can just guard one exit - and I think here we might assume that the narrow path to the right of the labelled playground area might be a cast member exit to behind the retail space, and so the only entrance would be on the left side of the play area as we look at it on the map. The square edges at the top of that space suggest there is perhaps some kind of small temple-like Mayan structure then and then the pathways at the bottom half of the area given plenty of opportunities for adventures in the jungle.

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The labelled retail and character greeting space is also a bit of conjecture. The lower of the two buildings is where Len has the character greeting, and this area does make sense. That structure could be a combined store and character greeting location, and the area directly below it looks like it could be backstage, which gives the characters an easy way to their meeting spot. A couple of factors make me wonder if the structure to the right of the Fountain could also serve as a character greeting. First, having the characters meet closer to the "town square" makes more sense in story telling sense, versus the other location, which is also quite close to the "Mayan" area of the land rather than the Encanto area. That building is also quite close to the cast member break room at the top of the map, making an easy exit for characters when their meeting is over. The counterpoint here is that a queue at this location would potentially impede foot traffic on its way to the Encanto ride, although its also possible that this pathway would mainly be those exiting the Encanto ride, and slowing them down as they pass the gift shop isn't perhaps a deal breaker!

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In terms of size, adding these structures to Google Maps suggests that the Encanto show building is around ~72,000 square feet or ~6,700 square metres. For comparison, my rough estimates have this as close to Disneyland's enormous it's a small world building and exterior queue (80,000 sqft) and very close to Disneyland's Pirates of the Caribbean (74,000 sqft) or their own version of Indiana Jones (72,000 sqft). Indeed, it isn't that much smaller than the gigantic building across the Animal Kingdom in Pandora which houses both Flight of Passage and Na'vi River Journey (89,000 sqft). In short, this is a massive building and I think folks might be underestimating the scale of this attraction. I think Encanto has the best Disney soundtrack in decades, and if they can fill this size of space with that energy, I think we're going to have a genuine e-ticket ride on our hands, akin to something like the stunning Anna and Elsa's Frozen Journey in Tokyo.

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One final observation is what we don't obviously see on this map, and that's animal habitats. Personally, I think Avatar is a great fit in Animal Kingdom, and understand that when you build Pandora that means you can't add live animals. However, for a Central/South American themed land, it does seem like a missed opportunity to not include some additional animal attractions in the only park worldwide in which animals reside. Capybara are extremely popular with kids, and tropical birds like toucans or macaws (who already fly around the Tree of Life) seem like they should be relatively inexpensive to add and maintain habitats for (we're not asking for a panda enclosure here). Given that Antonio's gift is related to communicating with animals and we understand that the carousel is themed to animals, it does seem somewhat odd if Disney make the decision to skip real life animals entirely for this area of the park. Indeed, per Len's article, the Encanto ride project is named Tico, after the toucan in the movie!

Of course, we do need base these decisions in reality, and with this area originally themed to dinosaurs - for whom there were more understandably no live versions of - adding even smaller animals would potentially requiring adding additional facilities to support their upkeep. I'm still hopeful that there could space for