Disneyland is a theme park at the Disneyland Resort in Anaheim, California, United States. It was the first theme park opened by the Walt Disney Company and the only one designed and constructed under the direct supervision of Walt Disney, opening on July 17, 1955.

Disney initially envisioned building a tourist attraction adjacent to his studios in Burbank to entertain fans who wished to visit; however, he soon realized that the proposed site was too small for the ideas that he had. After hiring the Stanford Research Institute to perform a feasibility study determining an appropriate site for his project, Disney bought a 160-acre site near Anaheim in 1953. The park was designed by a creative team hand-picked by Walt from internal and outside talent. They founded WED Enterprises, the precursor to today’s Walt Disney Imagineering. Construction began in 1954 and the park was unveiled during a special televised press event on the ABC Television Network on July 17, 1955. Since its opening, Disneyland has undergone many expansions and major renovations, including the addition of New Orleans Square in 1966, Bear Country in 1972 (known today as Bayou Country), Mickey’s Toontown in 1993, and Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge in 2019. Additionally, the theme park Disney California Adventure opened in 2001 on the site of Disneyland’s original parking lot.

Disneyland has had a larger cumulative attendance than any other theme park in the world, with 757 million visits since it opened (as of December 2021). In 2024, the park saw 17.33 million visitors, making it the second most visited amusement park in the world that year, behind Magic Kingdom, the very park it inspired.

Disneyland was dedicated at an “International Press Preview” event held on Sunday, July 17, 1955, which was open only to invited guests and the media. Although 28,000 people attended the event, only about half of those were invitees, the rest having purchased counterfeit tickets, or snuck into the park by climbing over the fence. The following day, it opened to the public, featuring twenty attractions. The Special Sunday events, including the dedication, were televised nationwide and anchored by three of Walt Disney’s friends from Hollywood: Art Linkletter, Bob Cummings, and Ronald Reagan. ABC broadcast the event live, during which many guests tripped over the television camera cables. In Frontierland, a camera caught Cummings kissing a dancer. When Disney started to read the plaque for Tomorrowland, he read partway when an off-camera technician stopped him, and Disney responded, “I thought I got a signal”, and began the dedication again. At one point, while in Fantasyland, Linkletter tried to give coverage to Cummings, who was on the pirate ship. He was not ready and tried to give the coverage back to Linkletter, who had lost his microphone. Cummings then did a play-by-play of him trying to find it in front of Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride.

Traffic was delayed on the two-lane Harbor Boulevard. It was a very hot day, and guests were frustrated with the large crowds. Among the many issues; rides broke down, restaurants ran out of food and drinks, the doors to Sleeping Beauty Castle were left unlocked allowing guests to see inside of its empty shell, and the Mark Twain Riverboat was overloaded with guests. Because of this, the park’s first day of operation was known as “Black Sunday”.

At the time, and during the lifetimes of Disney and his brother Roy, July 17 was considered a preview, with July 18 the official opening day. Since then, aided by memories of the television broadcast, the company has adopted July 17 as the official date, the one commemorated every year as Disneyland’s birthday.

Within a year after Disneyland’s opening, increasing friction between Disney and Wood resulted in Wood’s termination. Most of the executives who led the development of Disneyland are now commemorated in window signs as proprietors of fictional businesses along Main Street, USA, with the exception of Wood.