Disney World’s about to Lose Most of Its Cool Fake Caves

The closing of Tom Sawyer Island means Disney World will have a severe lack of a grand theme park tradition: cool fake caves

By Garrett Martin | July 2, 2025 | 3:09pm

Theme Parks Features disney world

Disney World’s about to Lose Most of Its Cool Fake Caves

When Tom Sawyer Island closes at the Magic Kingdom this Sunday, Disney World won’t just be losing an attraction that has been a part of the park for over 50 years. It’ll also be losing at least, like, 75% of its cool fake caves. And although that’s only a small part of the theme park history that’ll be going away (the Rivers of America and Liberty Square Riverboat are both also closing), I don’t want it to be overlooked. Cool fake caves, after all, are cool.

Much like fake elevators, there’s a deep, illustrious history of fake caves in Disney theme parks. Sometimes you ride through them, like on Big Thunder Mountain Railroad or Tokyo DisneySea’s Journey to the Center of the Earth. The coolest fake caves, though, are the ones you can freely explore on foot, at your own leisure, with all the time you need to investigate every nook and cranny. The spirit of those fake caves represents one of the purest distillations of the Disney theme park ethos and the artistic goal that every Imagineer shoots for: they’re human-made spaces that look and feel not real, per se, but hyperreal, like a magnification of what we expect from the idea of a cave, and yet, despite their earthly familiarity and obvious fabrication, still have the ability to fully transport us somewhere else. You know a fake cave is a cool one when you’re not even thinking about how it’s fake when you’re inside of it; you’re just there, in that cave, enjoying its mysteries and its warmth and its equal promise of adventure and the mundane—enjoying a cave that isn’t “real” and yet realer than any other cave you’ve ever been in, if you’re somebody who somehow finds themself in real caves here in the Beyond Tomorrowland year of 2025.

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The three fake caves at Tom Sawyer Island are each the platonic ideal of a fake theme park cave. (Speaking of Plato: while Tom Sawyer Island isn’t quite old enough for these to be the caves that guy was talking about, you know he’d have a lot to say about them regardless; for him they’d be like that infinity effect you get when you point a mirror at a mirror.) Disney’s cave work might have gotten more refined and elaborate since these were built at the dawn of the 1970s, but every cave they’ve made since, from the dragon’s lair and pirate fort at Disneyland Paris to Tokyo’s amazing queue for Journey to the Center of the Earth, owes a crucial debt to this tiny island. Everything you hope to see in a fake cave, especially a cool one, is already here: that immediate rush of darkness, the promise of unexpected adventure around every corner, unearthly lights of a quasi-mystical nature, craggy tendrils reaching out from the floor and roof as if the cave itself is trying to grab you in its clutches. And of course it helps that cool fake caves are, quite literally, cool, offering a brief but much-needed respite from Florida’s brutal heat and humidity.

Disney World closures Tom Sawyer Island

These three caves aren’t the only things I’ll miss about Tom Sawyer Island, of course. I didn’t even mention the grist mill or its owl’s nest, the windmill (which, sadly, has already been closed), or Fort Langhorn—an interactive, life-sized toy box in the form of an 19th century frontier fort, with rifle roosts, squawking chickens, a (barely) animated blacksmith, and an escape tunnel that might be the most thrilling of the island’s three caves. And then there’s the barrel bridge, which might be preserved if the concept art for the Cars ride taking this land is accurate, and the barges, which are the only way to get to the island and serve as a kind of preshow (but are also a bottleneck that no doubt contributed to its considerable lack of popularity with modern audiences). Tom Sawyer Island is actually the most playful part of the entire park; the cool fake caves might not even be the coolest thing about this place.

I understand that Tom Sawyer Island is, well, deeply unpopular today. And it carries a lot of baggage from the racist slur that was a part of its official branding and signage until just three years ago. (Indeed, one of its three caves bore an offensive name for almost 50 years, from when the island opened in 1973 up until the start of 2022.) There’s probably no way for Disney to modernize it to make it more popular for today’s guests, and the secluded nature of the island makes it impractical to update it with a more resonant theme. Sadly replacing the whole thing is the easiest and most affordable way to make this underused part of the park more vibrant.

Disney theme parks shouldn’t look for the easiest and most affordable ways to do anything, though. Among the major things that make these parks special are their fastidious, deliberate design, their extreme attention to detail, and the sense that no expense was spared to create these fantastic spaces. Disney is no doubt prepared to pump a ton of money into Piston Peak National Park, the setting of the Cars ride that will be replacing Tom Sawyer Island and much of the Rivers of America, but with the ample amount of space available to them in Florida they could’ve fit that into another part of the Magic Kingdom, and paid to make Tom Sawyer Island more accessible while updating its theme to something that would more greatly appeal to today’s audience—perhaps even one where cool fake caves would still make sense.

I’d be surprised if the upcoming Cars ride didn’t have a fake cave or two of its own. Maybe they’ll even be cool. They probably won’t be as charming or mysterious as the three on Tom Sawyer Island, though, or open to explore freely in the same way. Disney World won’t be losing much in the eyes of most fans when this island and its caves close for good on Sunday, but for those who still feel a fondness for Tom Sawyer Island, the Magic Kingdom will become a little less quaint and a little less enchanting. And it’ll definitely have way less cool fake caves.

Editor-in-chief Garrett Martin writes about video games, pinball, theme parks and more. You can also find him on Blue Sky.