City Park (Varosliget) is the principal public park of Budapest, occupying around a square kilometre of landscaped grounds at the end of the grand Andrassy Avenue beyond Heroes' Square, in the Pest side of the Hungarian capital. The park is one of the oldest public parks in the world to be created deliberately as a public recreation ground rather than a former royal hunting reserve, and is home to a remarkable concentration of the principal cultural and recreational attractions of the city. The site was a marshy royal hunting ground until the late eighteenth century, when it was drained and laid out as a public park - one of the first such deliberately planned public parks anywhere in the world. The park was comprehensively redesigned and developed for the great Hungarian Millennium Exhibition of 1896, which celebrated the thousandth anniversary of the Magyar conquest of the Carpathian basin in 896, and most of the park's principal monuments and buildings date from that great national celebration. The park holds an extraordinary range of major attractions. The fairytale Vajdahunyad Castle - a composite building combining Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque architectural styles drawn from across historic Hungary, built for the 1896 exhibition - sits on an island in the park lake, which is used for boating in summer and as a large open-air ice rink in winter. The celebrated Szechenyi Thermal Baths, one of the largest medicinal bath complexes in Europe, occupies a vast neo-Baroque building on the northern edge of the park. The park also holds the Budapest Zoo and Botanical Garden, the Municipal Grand Circus, the Vidam Park amusement grounds and the Museum of Fine Arts on the adjoining Heroes' Square. The park is entered through the monumental Heroes' Square (Hosok tere), with its great Millennium Monument of the seven Magyar chieftains and the principal figures of Hungarian history. The park has undergone a major redevelopment in recent years under the Liget Budapest project, which added the striking new Museum of Ethnography and the House of Hungarian Music. The park is freely accessible at all hours and is reached from the city centre by the historic M1 metro line - the oldest underground railway on the European continent.

Type: Outdoors

Address: Varosliget, Budapest, Hungary