Grand Boulevard (Budapest)

Nagykörút or Grand Boulevard (sometimes Great Boulevard, lit. "Big Ring Road") is one of the most central and busiest parts of Budapest, a major thoroughfare built by 1896, Hungary's Millennium. It forms a semicircle connecting two bridges of the Danube, Margaret Bridge on the north and Petőfi Bridge on the south. Usually the part inside and around this semicircle is counted as the city centre of Budapest (see Belváros).

Nagykörút is actually a colloquial name of its five parts which connect to each other: (from north to south) Szent István körút, Teréz körút, Erzsébet körút, József körút and Ferenc körút; these are the names the traveller will find on the map and the buildings. Nagykörút is usually meant to include its Pest part (i.e., the east side of the Danube), but it might be applied to its extension on the Buda side as well (in this latter sense, Margit körút will be its sixth part).

It consists of a 35–40 m wide, about 4.5 km long road (not counting the bridge and the Buda side) with a tram line in the middle. It crosses a few major squares such as Nyugati tér, Oktogon and Blaha Lujza tér, basic points of reference for the locals. The four major roads which cross it are Váci út (north), Andrássy Avenue (northeast; part of the World Heritage), Rákóczi út (east) and Üllői út (southeast).

On the Nagykörút one can find (from north to south) the Comedy Theatre (Vígszínház, 1896), Western Railway Station (Nyugati pályaudvar, 1877, built by Gustave Eiffel's team), Radisson Blu Béke Hotel (1913), Corinthia Hotel Budapest (former Grand Hotel Royal, 1896), the New York Café, today Boscolo Budapest Hotel (1894), and the Art Nouveau palace of the Museum of Applied Arts (1896). Among the modern landmarks are the Skála Metró shopping centre (1984) and the WestEnd City Center, a shopping mall (1999). Beside them, there are lots of small and bigger shops, stores on its either side, and mostly turn-of-the-century residential buildings above them.

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