Water Pageant

The Electrical Water Pageant from the balcony of a room at Disney's Contemporary Resort: I don’t know if it’s officially the oldest unchanged view at Walt Disney World, but it’s got to be up there. The Water Pageant has a history that spans more than five decades–just a few weeks younger than the Contemporary itself. Fourteen floats, each 40 feet long and 25 feet tall and all in all covered in more than 50,000 lights, it’s been running its same route faithfully, night after night, since October 1971. And yet it’s easy for guests to miss Walt Disney World’s longest running parade if they don’t happen to be staying at a Magic Kingdom resort or leaving the Magic Kingdom at just the right time.  I shot this from the balcony of our room at the Contemporary late one evening in June 2023. The Electrical Water Pageant usually makes its pass by the Contemporary a little after 10 o’clock at night. The kids were half asleep after a long day in the parks and I’d sat down in a chair on the room’s l