City Park

One of the oldest public parks in the world, and the reason a large part of Budapest's cultural life happens in one place.

What is now Városliget was marshy common land until the early nineteenth century, when it was drained and laid out to a competition-winning landscape design — a park made deliberately for the public rather than opened to them from a royal estate, which was close to unprecedented at the time.

Its present shape comes from 1896, when the Millennium Exhibition filled it with pavilions for the thousandth anniversary of the Magyar conquest. Most were temporary. Two were not: Vajdahunyad Castle, and the underground railway built to carry visitors out here from the city centre, which still runs as metro line M1.

Inside the park, in walking distance of each other, are the Széchenyi Baths, the Zoo, the Museum of Fine Arts, the Museum of Ethnography, the House of Music, Vajdahunyad Castle and a boating lake that freezes into the largest outdoor ice rink in Europe each winter.

A recent redevelopment programme added the newer museums and has been argued over continuously — the gain in cultural buildings against the loss of green space is a live civic dispute, not a settled one.