Liget Budapest Project

This is Europe’s largest and most ambitious urban cultural development

The Liget Budapest Project is currently Europe's largest urban development project with a cultural content, thanks to which the country has been enriched by cultural and landscape architecture investments on a scale not seen since the Millennium, many of which have now become new landmarks in Hungary. Thanks to the improvements completed during the first 10 years of the project, the City Park is back to its former glory, becoming Budapest's number one family theme park, offering much more and better than before to all visitors, from the youngest to the oldest, from culture lovers to nature lovers. This is confirmed by the incredible popularity of the elements delivered so far, with Liget Budapest's attendance already exceeding seven and a half million by the end of its first decade, 2023.  After the project is fully implemented in its entirety, the City Park, i.e. the Liget Budapest, will be one of Europe’s largest and most complex cultural districts with its developments encompassing 150 years.

Why the City Park?

The Városliget is the most popular park in the Hungarian capital, where not only the green space itself, but also the rich cultural and entertainment facilities, which are unique in Europe, are a great attraction for visitors. It is home to the Zoo, which opened in 1866, the Kunsthalle, built around the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, the country's largest public art collection, the Museum of Fine Arts, Vajdahunyad Castle (including the Agricultural Museum), but it is also the site of Europe's oldest and largest outdoor ice rink, the Városligeti Ice Rink, built in the last third of the 1800s, and the Széchenyi Baths, Budapest's largest bathing complex, built in 1913. In addition to these, the Budapest Circus, which has also been operating here since the end of the 19th century, and the Millennium House, built in 1885 as the Kunsthalle, enrich the park's institutional network. Thanks to these, more than half of the park's 5 million visitors a year come to Városliget to visit the institutions located here. Few public parks in the world have such a rich network of institutions, built into the park rather than around it, dating back more than a century: perhaps the most similar is Forest Park in St. Louis, USA, which has a zoo and a science centre in addition to history and art museums. The City Park's heyday dates back to the second half of the 19th century and before World War II, but in the second half of the 20th century it gradually lost its appeal and for decades was an undeservedly neglected part of the city. The park's neglected vegetation and buildings were in need of renewal, and the park was littered with rust zones and old, dilapidated, disused buildings.

The Liget Budapest project, launched in 2013, will not upset the balance established during the organic development of the park: even after its renewal, the urban density of the City Park will remain below 7% and the proportion of green spaces will increase: this is guaranteed by the legislation that provides the framework for development. The green area of the park will be significantly increased by tens of thousands of square metres compared to the previous level, thanks to the removal and greening of many roads and parking areas: more green and more culture in the City Park. The designers of the new buildings in the park were selected through an international architectural design competition. Prior to this, no international architectural design competition had ever been held in Hungary, either during the four decades of communism or in the two and a half decades following its fall.