The Palace of the Parliament (Palatul Parlamentului) in Bucharest is the heaviest building in the world and one of the largest administrative buildings anywhere, a colossal monument to the megalomania of the Romanian communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. Built on the Spirii Hill at the head of a grand boulevard in central Bucharest, the vast building today houses the two chambers of the Romanian Parliament along with museums and a conference centre, and is the principal landmark and most-visited attraction of the Romanian capital. The palace was commissioned by Ceausescu in the early 1980s as the centrepiece of a sweeping and ruthless redevelopment of central Bucharest. To clear the site and build the surrounding Civic Centre, an entire historic quarter of the old city - around a fifth of the historic centre - was demolished, sweeping away churches, monasteries, synagogues and the homes of tens of thousands of people, in a project widely compared to the destruction wrought in other dictatorships. Construction began in 1984, mobilising a workforce of tens of thousands of labourers and soldiers working in shifts around the clock, and the building was still unfinished when Ceausescu was overthrown and executed in December 1989. The statistics of the building are staggering. It covers some 365,000 square metres of floor space across twelve storeys above ground and eight below, containing more than a thousand rooms. The building was constructed almost entirely from Romanian materials - around a million cubic metres of marble, vast quantities of crystal for the chandeliers, hundreds of thousands of square metres of carpet much of it woven on site, and immense quantities of wood and gold leaf. The grand halls, marble staircases, enormous chandeliers and gilded ceilings were intended to project the absolute power of the regime. The building today is a working seat of government, housing the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate, as well as the National Museum of Contemporary Art and a museum of the communist period. Much of the vast structure remains unused. Guided tours, which require advance booking and identification, cover a fraction of the building - the grand reception halls, the marble corridors and a balcony overlooking the grand boulevard. The building is open daily for tours and is the unmissable monument of modern Bucharest.

Type: Tourist Attraction

Address: Strada Izvor 2-4, Bucharest, Romania

Website: https://cic.cdep.ro

Opening Date: 01/01/1997