Famous as the home of Walt Disney World, Orlando is Florida’s third-largest city after Miami and Tampa and one of the most-visited cities in the U.S. and the world. It sits 40 miles inland from the Atlantic coast in a region scattered with hundreds of lakes that surround the city on all sides. 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 Orlando. 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, Orlando 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 Orlando 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 Orlando’s inland location, hurricanes hampered development, as did the Great Depression. Then World War II changed the face of the city, as nearby air bases swelled with troops and their families.
But the biggest surge of interest in Orlando occurred two decades after the War ended when Walt Disney chose the city as the location of Disney World over Tampa, which was more at risk of hurricane damage because of its exposure to the Gulf Coast. The resort opened in 1971, and in the decades since then, the Orlando metropolitan area has ballooned with a focus on tourism from all around the country and the world. Other theme parks have chosen Orlando as their home as well, turning the city into a global entertainment capital, and there are great short-term rental options near it all.
