The second-largest administrative building in the world after the Pentagon, and by weight the heaviest building of any kind on Earth. Ceaușescu commissioned it in 1984 from a 28-year-old architect, Anca Petrescu, and tore down a fifth of historic Bucharest to clear the site. It was nowhere near finished when the regime fell in 1989; the Romanian parliament inherited it as a half-built embarrassment and has been completing it slowly ever since.
The 45-minute standard tour (book ahead with photo ID) takes you through marble halls of staggering scale — 3,100 rooms, twelve stories, 330,000 square metres of floor space. The balcony where Michael Jackson said "Hello Budapest!" in 1992 is part of the tour. Longer tours include the basement nuclear shelters and the half-finished underground levels. The MNAC contemporary art museum is in the same building, accessed by a separate entrance on the east side.