Theme parks, lakes, and a city underneath
Orlando, Florida sits at the center of the state on a chain of freshwater lakes, a city that spent most of its history as a quiet citrus and cattle town before Walt Disney World rewrote its identity in 1971. The tourist corridor along International Drive is its own parallel universe — but the city proper has a distinct character. The Mills 50 district pulses with Vietnamese restaurants and indie galleries. The Mennello Museum of American Art sits quietly on Lake Formosa. The history of the Orlando nightclub shooting is memorialized with care at the onePULSE Foundation site. Underneath the manufactured magic, Orlando is one of the most genuinely multicultural cities in the South — shaped by Puerto Rican, Haitian, Brazilian, and Vietnamese communities who arrived long before the theme park buses.
