ChampionsGate is a resort-style community in central Florida, between Davenport in the south and Four Corners in the north, about 10 miles south of Walt Disney World and 30 miles southwest of Orlando. You’ll know you’re there when you see the community’s distinctive gate and neat rows of palm trees. ChampionsGate has everything you’d want in a vacation destination: food, drinking, entertainment, sports, hair and nail salons, and more. Of particular note: 36 holes of championship golf designed by Greg Norman, the international golf champion.
Before European colonization, the region was inhabited by the Timucua and later the Seminole peoples. In the early nineteenth century, a treaty established a Seminole reservation that encompassed an area including present-day ChampionsGate. However, the Indian Removal Act of 1830 subsequently forcibly relocated the Seminole to Oklahoma, resulting in the Second Seminole War. White settlement in the area followed thereafter. In the late nineteenth century, the Orlando metro area, which ChampionsGate belongs to, anchored Florida’s citrus industry, but the Great Freeze of 1894-5 ruined many local citrus groves, sending the industry elsewhere in the South.
Tourism to the area began to pick up in the early twentieth century, with visitors enjoying the region’s beautiful environments and excellent Sun Belt climate. Land prices began to rise, as part of a larger trend across the state, and development in downtown Orlando boomed. Despite the metro area’s inland location, hurricanes hampered development, as did the Great Depression. Then World War II changed the face of the region, as nearby air bases swelled with troops and their families.
But the biggest surge of interest occurred two decades after the War ended when Walt Disney chose the area as the location of Disney World. The resort opened in 1971, and in the decades since then, Orlando and its suburbs have ballooned with a focus on tourism from all around the country and the world. Other theme parks have chosen the area as their home as well, turning it into a global entertainment capital, and ChampionsGate has great short-term rental options near it all.
