Orlando by the Numbers: 76.7 Million Visitors, 100 Lakes and a Hero Who Never Existed
Seventy-six point seven million people visited Orlando last year. That is more than the entire population of the United Kingdom, arriving in one Florida city, in twelve months, a great many of them to stand in a queue.
Orlando has been the most visited destination in the United States for years running, and 2025 was its biggest year on record. But underneath the resorts and the wristbands sits a stranger, older city — one with more than a hundred lakes, a downtown lake that is technically a hole in the ground, a theme park that beat Disney by twenty-two years, and a namesake hero who, on the evidence, never existed.
Here is Orlando by the numbers, and the stories the numbers leave out.
Five things worth knowing
The man the city is named after almost certainly never existed
Every Orlando guidebook tells you about Orlando Reeves — a soldier killed by Seminoles near Lake Eola somewhere around 1837, his name carved into a tree as a memorial, the town later named in his honour.
It's a great story. It also appears to be entirely invented. Military muster rolls from the Seminole Wars contain no Orlando Reeves, and no soldier deaths were ever recorded in Orange County.
The two candidates who did exist are less romantic and more plausible. Judge James Gamble Speer, who arrived in 1854, is said to have named the town after Orlando in Shakespeare's As You Like It; the 1915 book Early Settlers of Orange County records that he chose the name of “one of Shakespeare's characters,” and his descendants confirmed it to the Orlando Sentinel in 1998. The other is Colonel Orlando Savage Rees (1796–1852), a South Carolina plantation owner who led expeditions into Central Florida after Seminoles attacked his Spring Garden property in 1836. His descendants claimed in the 1950s that he carved his name into a tree out here.
Before any of that, the settlement was called Fort Gatlin, and then Jernigan, after a settler who opened the post office in 1850. Orlando only stuck in 1857.
There was a theme park here twenty-two years before Disney
Walt Disney World opened in 1971 and rearranged Central Florida permanently. But Orlando's first theme park opened in 1949, and it was Gatorland — which billed a claimed world-record fifteen-foot alligator and is, remarkably, still open.
It is worth sitting with the fact that this city's tourism industry began with one very large reptile.
The prettiest lake downtown is a hole in the ground
Orlando has more than a hundred lakes inside the city limits, which is why the official nickname is The City Beautiful rather than anything to do with theme parks.
The most photographed of them, Lake Eola, with its swan boats and its fountain, is not really a lake at all. It's a sinkhole — eighty feet deep at its lowest point.
The Orlando Magic were nearly the Orlando Juice
When the NBA franchise was being named in 1987, the shortlist came down to four: Heat, Tropics, Juice and Magic. Magic won. Heat went south to Miami and did rather well with it.
Somewhere in an alternate timeline, Shaquille O'Neal spent his rookie season playing for the Juice.
It was the citrus capital, until the weather ended that
Before tourism, Orlando was the centre of Florida's citrus industry. A severe freeze in the late 1800s wiped out the groves and pushed the whole industry south, where it stayed.
The city that lost its oranges is now the seat of Orange County. Nobody has done anything about the name.
Where 76.7 million people actually come from
The headline number is enormous, but the mix is more interesting than the total. 91.6% of Orlando's visitors are domestic — 70.3 million Americans, up 2.2% on the year. International travel went the other way, down 2.4% to 6.3 million.
| Top international markets, 2025 | Visitors | Year on year |
|---|---|---|
| Canada | 1,120,000 | −13.3% |
| United Kingdom | 933,500 | +2.8% |
| Brazil | 736,300 | +5.6% |
| Mexico | 458,500 | +4.6% |
| Colombia | 360,000 | +5.0% |
Close to a million Britons made the trip in a single year — the only top-five market other than Brazil, Mexico and Colombia to grow while Canadian visits fell by more than 13%.
Orlando, on your wall
We print Orlando in three styles. All three are the same city and three completely different moods, which is the entire point of a city print — it should look like the version of the place you remember.
Or make it the exact spot
A city print is the city. A map canvas is the corner of it that matters — the hotel on International Drive where you proposed, the house off Colonial Drive you grew up in, the park bench by Lake Eola. Any location on earth, with names and a date underneath.
Orlando is very good at being the thing everybody expects it to be. But it was a citrus town before it was a theme park town, it has been quietly beautiful the whole time, and it is named after a man who was probably a character in a play.
Worth a spot on the wall, we think.
Sources: visitor and market figures from Visit Orlando (2025 full-year data); airport passenger totals and national ranking via News 6 Orlando; naming history from the Florida History Blog; lakes, Gatorland and Magic naming details via WorldStrides.
