My last visit to Disneyland Paris was in 2008, when I was 18 and The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror was the exciting new addition to Walt Disney Studios Park. Disney officially inaugurated the attraction that April, which places my memories of the trip rather neatly in Disneyland Paris history.
I have also recently found the photographs from that visit, although I won’t be publishing them. This is partly because they are of little relevance to the wider Disneyland Paris story, but mainly because some of my fashion choices as an 18-year-old are better left in 2008.
What I remember much more clearly is being disappointed by the resort itself. Disneyland Park was beautiful, and even then there was something extraordinary about walking down Main Street towards that castle, but the overall experience wasn’t what I had spent years imagining a Disney park would be. I remember areas looking tired and dirty, food that was genuinely poor and service that frequently felt indifferent. Walt Disney Studios Park, which had only opened six years earlier, was particularly underwhelming and still had that peculiar early identity of soundstages, exposed concrete and a relatively small collection of attractions.
Perhaps my expectations had simply been too high, but I came home feeling that Disneyland Paris hadn’t quite delivered the Disney experience I thought I had been visiting.
I didn’t return for 18 years.
Disneyland Paris has changed enormously
Walking back into Disneyland Paris in 2026 was therefore rather strange because so much of what had disappointed me before simply wasn’t there anymore.
The difference in the overall standard of the resort was immediately noticeable. Everything felt cleaner and better maintained, the food was vastly better than I remembered and, across the few days we were there, my experience of the Cast Members was overwhelmingly positive. There were small moments throughout the trip when I found myself comparing what I was experiencing with my memories from 2008 and wondering whether I had been too harsh on Disneyland Paris all those years ago.
What has changed most dramatically, though, is the former Walt Disney Studios Park. In March 2026 it officially became Disney Adventure World as part of a transformation that Disney says has refreshed more than 90 per cent of the park’s original offering. World of Frozen opened alongside Adventure Way, Adventure Bay and the new Tangled attraction, while the immense central lake now provides the setting for Disney Cascade of Lights. The expansion forms part of a €2 billion investment programme and, when completed, will have roughly doubled the size of the second park.
Having seen the old Walt Disney Studios Park, the scale of that change is difficult to overstate. There are still areas that need work and it is certainly not finished, but Disney Adventure World now feels as though it is becoming an actual Disney theme park rather than an overflow area built next door to one.
World of Frozen is beautifully themed, Adventure Way finally gives the park some sense of arrival and the huge Adventure Bay changes the scale of the whole place. Construction is already continuing on the up coming Lion King area, which will bring another major attraction to the park, so there is now a sense of momentum at Disneyland Paris that simply wasn’t there when I last visited.
The same is true elsewhere across the resort, from the ongoing redevelopment of Disney Village to refurbished hotels and improved restaurants. For the first time, I came away from Disneyland Paris thinking not about what it had failed to be, but about what it might become next.
There is just one rather large problem.
Disneyland Park hasn’t kept up
Disneyland Park remains the reason I would tell someone to visit Disneyland Paris. It is spectacular.
You could make a very convincing argument that it is the most beautiful castle park Disney has ever built. Le Château de la Belle au Bois Dormant is far more interesting than simply being a larger copy of Sleeping Beauty Castle in California; Adventureland is wonderfully detailed, Fantasyland has a distinctly European character and Discoveryland’s Jules Verne-inspired theme gives it an identity that no other Disney park quite shares.
Paris also has some exceptional versions of classic attractions. Big Thunder Mountain, sitting on an island in the middle of the Rivers of the Far West is, in my opinion, the best version Disney has built. Phantom Manor expands Haunted Mansion into the wider story of Thunder Mesa, Pirates of the Caribbean remains excellent and Paris’s Space Mountain is considerably more intense than its American counterparts.
My criticism isn’t that Disneyland Park doesn’t have good rides, because it absolutely does. The problem is that it simply doesn’t have enough of them, particularly when compared with Disneyland in Anaheim.
Current attraction tracking shows Disneyland in Anaheim operating roughly 37 attractions. Disneyland Park Paris comes out at roughly 22.
That means Anaheim has somewhere in the region of a dozen to fifteen more things you can actually get on and ride, and having visited both parks relatively close together, the difference feels every bit as significant as those numbers suggest.
Anaheim just keeps giving you something else to ride
One of the things I loved most about Disneyland in California was how densely packed it is. You can finish one attraction, walk a relatively short distance and almost immediately find another.
Fantasyland demonstrates this better than anywhere. Alongside Peter Pan and Dumbo, which Paris also has, Anaheim gives you Alice in Wonderland, Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, Storybook Land Canal Boats, Casey Jr. Circus Train, Pinocchio’s Daring Journey, Snow White’s Enchanted Wish, the Mad Tea Party and the carousel. Elsewhere in the park you have Jungle Cruise, Indiana Jones Adventure, Matterhorn Bobsleds, Finding Nemo Submarine Voyage, The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh and Roger Rabbit’s Car Toon Spin before you even reach Disney’s more recent additions.
Then there are attractions such as Mickey & Minnie’s Runaway Railway, Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run and Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance, which give Disneyland the sort of enormous, technologically ambitious modern experiences that now sit alongside attractions built by Walt Disney himself. Disney’s current Disneyland listings show just how broad that attraction mix has become.
Paris has nothing comparable to Rise of the Resistance, and I think that is where the difference becomes more significant than simply counting rides.
Disneyland Park has some superb thrill attractions, but most of its headline rides have been there for decades. Big Thunder Mountain opened with the park in 1992, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Peril followed in 1993, Space Mountain arrived in 1995 and Buzz Lightyear Laser Blast opened in 2006.
Is Disneyland Paris too focused on younger families?
This lack of newer rides also contributes to something else I noticed during my visit: Disneyland Park feels more obviously geared towards families with younger children than the American parks.
That isn’t to suggest that the park is for children. Big Thunder Mountain, Hyperspace Mountain and Indiana Jones certainly provide thrills, while Phantom Manor, Pirates of the Caribbean and Star Tours have broad appeal. Disney has also always been at its best when attractions can be enjoyed by different generations together, rather than dividing everything into children’s rides and adult rides.
It is more about the balance of the park.
Anaheim can take you from Peter Pan’s Flight to Indiana Jones Adventure, from Alice in Wonderland to Rise of the Resistance and from a 1955 opening-day attraction to Mickey & Minnie’s Runaway Railway without ever leaving the same gate. There are gentle dark rides, thrill rides, huge modern E-tickets, smaller supporting attractions and plenty of things sitting somewhere in between.
Paris has much less of that middle and upper end.
If you remove the Fantasyland dark rides and the gentler family attractions from the equation, you are left relying heavily on Big Thunder Mountain, Space Mountain, Indiana Jones, Star Tours, Pirates and Phantom Manor. They are good enough that the park can get away with it, but most of them were already there when I visited in 2008.
In fact, several were already there when I was a small child.
For a resort that has spent billions reinventing itself, that suddenly feels rather strange.
Could Space Mountain finally change that?
This is why Disney’s recently announced plans for Space Mountain are considerably more interesting to me than another refurbishment of an existing ride might initially sound.
Disney confirmed at D23 in August that Star Wars Hyperspace Mountain will close at the end of 2027 for a refurbishment lasting several months, after which the attraction will return to its original Jules Verne-inspired identity as Space Mountain – De la Terre à la Lune. Walt Disney Imagineering isn’t simply changing the soundtrack and removing the Star Wars imagery either; Disney says the project will include extensive technical work, refreshed sets and props, a redesigned queue, new effects and a remastered version of Steve Bramson’s original score.
There is something particularly appropriate about returning Space Mountain to that identity because the original 1995 attraction was created specifically for Disneyland Paris. It wasn’t an imported American concept plonked into a European park, but something designed around Discoveryland and the work of Jules Verne, with the Columbiad cannon physically launching guests towards the Moon.
Disney itself described the original Space Mountain as the resort’s flagship attraction, and I would love the new version to reclaim that status.
The question is whether Disney sees this refurbishment simply as the restoration of a beloved classic or as the beginning of renewed investment in Disneyland Park itself.
Imagineering has described Space Mountain as a milestone within a wider programme called New Magic, intended to refresh Disneyland Paris’s classic attractions, and Disney says several other projects are already at different stages of development. That sounds promising, particularly after years in which so much of the resort’s attention has understandably been focused on fixing Walt Disney Studios Park.
A comprehensively rebuilt Space Mountain could also go some way towards addressing what I think Disneyland Park currently lacks: a genuine headline E-ticket that feels new enough and ambitious enough to stand alongside the attractions being built in the American parks.
It cannot, however, solve the ride-count problem on its own, because no matter how good the refurbishment is, Space Mountain will still be occupying exactly the same patch of Discoveryland that it has occupied since 1995.
Eventually, Disneyland Park needs genuinely new rides too.
Disneyland Paris has finally become somewhere I want to return to
The strange thing is that none of this diminished how much I enjoyed Disneyland Paris this time around. If anything, the reason the shortage of rides bothered me so much is because nearly everything else about the resort impressed me.
My memories of 2008 were of a Disney destination that never quite lived up to what I imagined it should be. In 2026, I found a resort that felt cared for, ambitious and substantially more confident in itself, with a second park that has changed beyond recognition and still has enormous expansion ahead of it.
Most importantly, I left wanting to go back, which is something the 18-year-old version of me certainly wouldn’t have predicted.
Perhaps that is why Disneyland Park’s problem now feels so obvious. The resort around it has changed dramatically, but its original park is still relying on essentially the same core collection of rides that carried it through the 1990s and 2000s. They remain excellent attractions, and Disneyland Park remains one of Disney’s most beautiful creations, but beauty alone isn’t enough when a smaller park in California can offer so much more to actually do.
Disney Adventure World needed the investment first, and it is finally receiving it. The redevelopment of Disney Village was overdue too, while the improvements to hotels, restaurants and the wider guest experience have made Disneyland Paris a far stronger destination than the one I remember.
Now it feels as though the attention can finally turn back towards the park that started it all.
Space Mountain – De la Terre à la Lune could be the beginning of that next chapter, particularly if Disney gives the attraction the scale of refurbishment its original reputation deserves. What I hope it isn’t, though, is considered the solution in itself.
Disneyland Park doesn’t need to become Anaheim, nor should it sacrifice the space, landscaping and atmosphere that make Paris so distinctive simply to increase a number on an attraction list. It does, however, need some new adventures worthy of the extraordinary park Disney built around them.
Disneyland Paris has fixed an awful lot since I last visited in 2008. Now, what’s next for Disneyland Park Paris?
Leave a Reply