The secrets of Sleeping Beauty Castle at Disneyland Paris

From below, Sleeping Beauty Castle looks like a big pink and blue film set. But it hides several things that many visitors never suspect. It’s spread over three levels: two shops on the ground floor, a hidden gallery upstairs and a cellar where a dragon sleeps. And one question keeps coming up: can you sleep there?

The answer is no, and I explain why further down. Here’s a tour of the castle’s secrets.

No. There’s no room or suite you can book inside Sleeping Beauty Castle, not even for VIPs or celebrities. You can visit the castle (the Gallery upstairs, La Tanière du Dragon in the cellar), but you can’t sleep there.

The confusion often comes from Cinderella Castle at Walt Disney World, in Florida, which really does have a suite inside. At Disneyland Paris, that’s not the case.

There’s also a practical reason. The castle is the backdrop for Disneyland Park’s night-time show, with lighting effects, water and pyrotechnics. All that equipment (pipes, technical gear) takes up the inside and makes it impossible to host overnight guests.

Yes, there’s a real dragon hidden under the castle. In the cellar, beneath the Merlin l’Enchanteur shop, a giant animatronic dragon is sleeping. Disneyland Paris is the only Disney park to have put a dragon under its castle.

The entrance is easy to miss: you go down a discreet staircase, and inside it’s deliberately dark.

For the dragon’s exact size, its story and a video, head to my La Tanière du Dragon page.

Yes, you can go upstairs in the castle. You reach it by a staircase and discover the story of the fairy tale told in stained glass and large tapestries.

It’s calm, often quiet and worth a few minutes above the crowds. I won’t go into everything here: I have a dedicated page for that.

Next to the castle, in a small garden, you’ll find the wishing well, in the spirit of Snow White’s well. Lots of visitors walk past without noticing it.

Contrary to popular belief, you don’t throw a coin in. The idea here is simply to make a wish. Legend has it that you can sometimes hear Snow White singing near the well. I should say it’s a legend, a bit of atmosphere: I’ve never heard her myself.

Not to be confused with the well: the pools at the foot of the castle also hold illuminated water jets. These are technical fountains, synchronised with the music and projections during the night-time show. Nothing to do with wishes: it’s show engineering.

In the US, the castle at Walt Disney World is Cinderella’s. In Paris, it’s Sleeping Beauty’s. That’s no accident.

The park’s creators, led by Imagineer Tony Baxter, wanted to make a big impression on a European audience already surrounded by real castles. Their approach: not to copy an existing historic castle, but to invent a fairy-tale castle, just as you’d picture it in a picture book. Sleeping Beauty fitted that idea perfectly.

To design it, the designers picked details from all over Europe: the silhouette of Mont Saint-Michel, which seems to spring from the ground and rise towards the sky, the towers of the Château d’Ussé (often nicknamed Sleeping Beauty’s castle) and the colourful roofs of the Hospices de Beaune.

They also drew on the illustrations from the 1959 film and on the storybook castle imagery that Neuschwanstein had already embodied for the American parks.

The result is an imaginary castle that looks like no real monument yet feels familiar. That’s what I find so well done: you recognise it straight away without being able to say where it comes from.

Once you know where to look, you see the castle differently. Its facade was deliberately painted pink to stand out against the often grey Île-de-France sky and look good in photos. It sits on a small artificial mound that makes it look taller as you walk up Main Street. And around it, the trees are clipped into geometric shapes, straight out of the film’s style.

• The snoring guards. In La Galerie de la Belle au Bois Dormant, upstairs, listen carefully: two guards in armour are snoring. They’re the voices of Tom Morris (art director of Fantasyland) and Son Lewis (the park’s music supervisor). And if you photograph them with a flash, one shows pink reflections and the other blue: a nod to the quarrel between the fairies Flora and Merryweather in the film.
• Stained glass in 12th-century style. The Gallery’s stained-glass windows were made by a master glassmaker, using the techniques of the 12th century. Period craftsmanship, rare in a theme park.

If you want to know everything about the building itself (architecture, dimensions, access), see the Sleeping Beauty Castle page. And to explore the park’s other mysteries, head to the secrets of Disneyland Paris. A personal touch: my father was one of the Cast Members there when the park opened, in 1992.