Discovery Island
— — the island the park gave back to the herons.
Not only on a wall.
“An eleven-acre island in Bay Lake, on the Walt Disney World resort near Orlando. It opened in 1974 as Treasure Island, took the name Discovery Island in 1978, and ran for two decades as a small zoological park. Closed in 1999, the buildings have stood unused since. From the lake shore the island is a thicket of cypress, palm, and quiet pier.
Discovery Island, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Discovery Island is an eleven-acre island in Bay Lake on the Walt Disney World property in Orange County, Florida, west of Orlando. It opened to guests in 1974 under the name Treasure Island and was rethemed and renamed Discovery Island in 1978. For most of its run it operated as a small accredited zoological park, holding birds, reptiles, and a few mammals along a half-mile pathway. The island closed to the public on April 8, 1999, when its animal collection was moved into the new Disney's Animal Kingdom, which had opened the year before.
Since closure the island has been left to the native Florida scrub: cypress, sabal palm, live oak, and the strangler fig. Reports from aerial photography show the queue rails, the aviary frames, and the small wooden bridges still in place under thickening growth. Wading birds that the park once kept in collection now use the island freely. Disney has marked it as off-limits to guests, and the lake's water-taxi routes pass it without docking. The buildings have stood unused for more than twenty-five years.
The island cannot be visited. Discovery Island is closed to the public and to resort guests, with the lake patrolled and the shoreline posted. It can be seen from the water from the Magic Kingdom ferry, from the Bay Lake and Seven Seas Lagoon water-launches, and from the upper rooms at Disney's Contemporary Resort, which faces it across the lake. The clearest views come on the first morning ferry, when the sun is low and the cypress silhouette reads cleanly above the water.