The steel frame of Casita, the Madrigal family home that will front Antonio’s Fiesta de Encanto, is now standing at the entrance to Animal Kingdom’s Tropical Americas construction site, and the carved temple sculptures for the Indiana Jones attraction next door have moved out of the backstage Imagineering yard and onto the pyramid’s facade. A large set of overnight aerial photographs and an aerial video published Saturday show the Pueblo Esperanza village taking shape between them.
Aerial overview of construction in Tropical Americas at Animal Kingdom.
— bioreconstruct (@bioreconstruct) September 5, 2026
• Mayan pyramid construction at top center for the Indiana Jones ride.
• Steel frame at left for Casita at the Encanto ride.
• Wooden circular-type roof at right for a carousel.
Casita Gets Its Bones
The house-shaped steel frame sits at the front of the Encanto show building, a huge flat-roofed box that is the only all-new structure of the two signature attractions. The frame has two openings, the ride’s entrance on the left and its exit on the right, and behind it a pile of grey rockwork is being shaped into the first of the gentle hills that will form the scene’s backdrop. Two low concrete walls in the foreground will hold a dirt berm between them, so that Casita reads as a house on a hill rather than a facade on flat ground. Grey block walls to the right already carry the mounting brackets for their theming, and a second steel hill-frame has gone up behind, matching the one beside Casita.
Aerial photo of steel frame for Casita at the front of Antonio’s Fiesta de Encanto. Entrance at left, exit at right.
— bioreconstruct (@bioreconstruct) September 5, 2026
Rock work in progress for a gentle backdrop hill. Walls at right have mounts for theming.
A berm, as a hill, will be between the concrete walls in foreground.
The Temple Gets Its Sculptures
Indiana Jones and the Myth of the Jade Serpent is a conversion of the former Dinosaur building, and its Maya pyramid dominates the top of the site. The colorful sculpted sections for the temple facade, which were carved and painted over several months at the Imagineering offices backstage at Animal Kingdom and had been visible in that yard for weeks, have now been craned into place above the rockwork forms on the pyramid itself.
Seen closer, the newly installed sections are a red and tan carved-stone pattern picked out with turquoise, matching the concept art and scale model Disney has shown, with individual carved blocks and recessed window-like openings across the face. Only the upper tiers carry the finish so far. Below them the steel superstructure is still wrapped in grey mesh, a tall mobile crane sits beside the pyramid, and stacks of additional panels are staged on the ground waiting to go up, which points to the cladding working its way down tier by tier.
Imagineering has been specific about what the finished face is meant to say. Project lead Joan Hartwig’s team designed the temple as it would have looked while still in use rather than as a buried ruin, and built it with a panel of Maya scholars: archaeologist Dr. Iván Batún has pointed to a Witz monster figure marking an entrance to the underworld and corner figures of the rain god Chaac, and Disney Legend Joe Rohde, consulting on the land, has said the glyphs across the facade were written by Tulane epigrapher Dr. Marc Zender so that a trained reader could actually read them.
A Village Fountain And A Kit Of Broken Walls
Between the two attractions, Pueblo Esperanza is being built as a town. Circular concrete forms with fresh concrete in them mark the fountain that Disney has said will sit at the center of the village, where the story goes that villagers gather to tell stories. Laid out on the ground nearby are theming models, small painted wall samples set out like a kit, showing crews how the village’s deliberately broken and weathered walls should be sculpted and painted; one such jagged wall is already going up beside the carousel queue building, scaffold against a fake-old surface. The carousel’s carved wooden roof, which arrived in late July, is now surrounded by the steel of the shops and restrooms rising around it, and the quick-service restaurant building is under scaffold and wrap.
Disney has said Tropical Americas opens in 2027. Antonio’s Fiesta de Encanto begins on the day Antonio receives his gift of talking to animals and carries riders through Casita on furniture brought to life; the Indiana Jones attraction sends guests into a newly discovered Maya temple rumored to hold a mythical creature. The land’s third ride is El Carrusel de los Animalitos, the woodcarver’s carousel of 22 hand-carved Disney and Pixar animals. As of this weekend, all three have visible structure, the town square has a fountain in the ground, and the two things guests will see first, Casita and the temple face, are no longer just steel.
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