Orlando's largest independent all-suite resort turned itself into a convention and entertainment city-state. The Caribe Royale at 8101 World Center Drive opened its first tower in November 1996, phasing in two more ten-story towers within six months and adding 120 two-bedroom villas by 1998 for an inventory of over 1,300 suites across a 60-plus-acre campus in Lake Buena Vista, a mile and a half from Walt Disney World. Privately held from the start - long a Sierra Land Group property, jointly run.....

The white tent at Disney Springs was the first permanent building Cirque du Soleil ever owned, and it has housed only two shows in nearly three decades. The freestanding theater on the West Side of Disney Springs at 1486 Buena Vista Drive, Lake Buena Vista, opened on 23 December 1998 with La Nouba, a Franco Dragone-directed production created exclusively for Walt Disney World. The 1,671-seat showroom - designed by Cirque's Michel Crete with Sceno Plus, Walt Disney Imagineering and New York's Roc.....

Themed as a tropical paradise devastated by a typhoon that left a shrimp boat impaled atop a volcanic peak, this 61-acre water park at Walt Disney World opened on 1 June 1989 and remains one of the most visited water parks in the world. The elaborate backstory explains every design element: uprooted palm trees, storm-scattered surfboards, and a tangle of fishing nets and buoys create a meticulously distressed tropical environment that belies the precision engineering beneath. The centrepiece is.....

Disney believed in the concept enough to buy 12 percent of the company before a single wall went up. House of Blues Orlando, at 1490 East Buena Vista Drive in the Disney Springs West Side at Walt Disney World, opened on 15 September 1997 as the sixth and largest House of Blues - and it remains one of Florida's premier club-scale concert venues. The building plays its part: a rambling, rusted-tin bayou lodge that looks airlifted from the Mississippi Delta, wrapped around a music hall whose walls.....