Dora The Explorer is one of Nickelodeon’s best-loved shows, but how old and tall is its eponymous character Dora Marquez? Unlike mere mortals, characters in cartoons and animated shows rarely age no matter how long they’ve been around. Take Bart, Lisa and Maggie from The Simpsons, for example, who’ve been in a state of arrested development since the show premiered in 1989 or the title character from Caillou, who remains four years old despite being created over two decades ago.
However, this trope isn’t strictly true for Dora Marquez who has had a few different incarnations since the Dora The Explorer franchise began. Co-created by Chris Gifford, Valerie Walsh Valdes and Eric Weiner, the long-running series began back in 2000 when the original Dora The Explorer cartoon started airing on Nickelodeon. Since then, it’s spawned video games and books, a number of toy lines and several international versions alongside a sequel series and a live-action movie that have seen young Dora age somewhat.
In the original Dora The Explorer, Dora is initially seven years old and later celebrates her eighth birthday in the cartoon’s fifth season. The sequel series Dora And Friends: Into The City! – which aired for two seasons between 2014 and 2017 – saw the adventurous young protagonist aged up ever so slightly to ten years old. Paramount’s live-action movie of the Nickelodeon show Dora And The Lost City Of Gold focused mostly on a 16-year-old Dora played by Isabela Merced but did briefly feature a six-year-old Dora at the start, portrayed by Madelyn Miranda.
It’s not officially known how tall the cartoon versions of Dora are in Dora The Explorer and Dora And Friends. However, a rather funny meme started circulating in late 2019 based on a seemingly (or at least hopefully) inaccurate Google search result that claimed Dora was either five foot one or five foot two. That could be true of the ten-year-old Dora that appeared in Dora And Friends, but it would have made the seven-year-old version from Dora The Explorer oddly tall for her age and all the taller characters around her even more freakishly tall. It’s more likely the original incarnation of Dora was a more average height of around four feet tall and had grown a few more inches by the time she was ten in Dora And Friends.
Obviously, it’s a lot easier to judge the height of the Dora that appears in Dora And The Lost City Of Gold because she’s played by real-life actresses. As Madelyn Miranda is four foot eight (according to Super Stars Bio) and Isabela Merced is five foot one (according to IMDb), it’s safe to assume the live-action version of Dora The Explorer is around the same height.