Santa’s Enchanted Forest is leaving Hialeah. Here’s where it will be in 2022
After a single season of spreading holiday cheer in Hialeah, Miami’s favorite Christmas theme park is moving again.
Santa’s Enchanted Forest, which moved to Hialeah Park in 2021 after losing its Tropical Park home in 2020, is moving to the border of Medley and Doral for its 2022 opening on Nov. 9.
The new Santa’s will be located at 7500 NW 87th Ave., on the northwest corner of 87th Avenue and 74th Street on a vacant lot owned by the Dunn family, one of Doral’s wealthiest landowners.
The new space for the theme park, which features rides, games, dioramas, performances, food vendors and (of course) Santa Claus, is around 40 acres, according to Maritza Gutierrez, spokesman for the park. That’s bigger than the space at the Hialeah Park and Tropical Park sites, she said.
“Hialeah Park was beautiful and a great location, but also a little smaller than what Santa’s needs,” she said.
The new space also addresses complaints last year that there wasn’t enough parking in Hialeah, Gutierrez said, adding that the new Santa’s will have more parking than even Tropical Park did.
The layout and design of the new Santa’s hasn’t been revealed yet, but trees are being trucked to the site to recreate the forest of lights that has become Santa’s signature, Gutierrez said. The attraction won’t say whether this is a temporary or permanent home.
The site is next to a quarry, south of the Medley landfill and just down the street from the Covanta waste-to-energy plant, which runs 24 hours a day every day and has drawn many complaints in the past from neighbors because of the smell.
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Gutierrez said the potential for odors was taken into consideration when the site was considered but says the smell won’t be a problem.
“Landfills operate during the day, and we’re closed during the day,” she said. “All of that has been taken into account and double-checked.”
The holiday theme park, owned by the South Florida-based Shechtman family, opened in 1983. It lost its longtime home at Tropical Park when the county’s Parks Department ordered the festival to leave after its lease expired without an option to renew in March 2020.
