The oldest surviving park in Dnipro, established in 1807 on a site first developed as a private garden by a retired Zaporozhian Cossack named Lazar Hloba in 1743. What began as one soldier's horticultural project became a botanical garden and eventually a 26-hectare urban park that now serves as the city's main green lung on the western bank of the Dnieper.
The park has an artificial lake with swans, a narrow-gauge children's railway dating from 1936, a dolphinarium, summer and winter theatres, and a monument to Hloba himself. It is where Dnipro families come on weekends, and on a warm afternoon it fills with the kind of low-key activity — strollers, ice cream, pensioners on benches — that makes a city feel lived in.