Városliget is Budapest's main urban park, a broad green space at the end of Andrássy Avenue that has been the city's public pleasure ground since the early 19th century. The park contains more concentrated attractions per hectare than almost anywhere else in Budapest: the Széchenyi thermal baths, the zoo, Vajdahunyad Castle, the Museum of Fine Arts, Heroes' Square, the Circus, and the new House of Music Hungary all sit within its boundaries or on its edges.
Heroes' Square, at the park entrance on Andrássy Avenue, is one of the great set-pieces of Central European civic architecture: a vast colonnaded semicircle topped with allegorical statues and anchored by the Millennium Monument, built in 1896 to celebrate a thousand years of Hungarian statehood. The park itself is best in summer, when the lake fills with paddleboats and the outdoor spaces around the baths fill with picnickers. In winter the lake becomes the largest outdoor ice-skating rink in Europe. The whole area is undergoing major redevelopment — the so-called Városliget project — which has been controversial but is gradually producing new museums and improved infrastructure.