Bucharest Audio Tours

Bucharest first appeared in documents in 1459, when Vlad Tepes issued a decree from the settlement on the Dambovita River, and grew into what 19th-century travelers called the Paris of the East. The comparison was not baseless: by the 1930s, Calea Victoriei, the main boulevard, was lined with neoclassical mansions, the Romanian Athenaeum concert hall rose in ornate grandeur, and the Arcul de Triumf stood in direct homage to its French equivalent. Then came the communist period, and then Nicolas Ceausescu, who in the 1980s demolished an entire quarter of historic Bucharest to build the Palace of Parliament, the second-largest administrative building in the world by floor area.

What survived the demolition is worth seeking.

The old Princely Court area and the merchant district of Lipscani contain streets barely changed since the 18th century, narrow lanes between painted facades with overhanging upper floors. Cismigiu Gardens, designed in 1847 by German landscape architect Carl F.W. Meyer, spread around a lake in the city center in a manner that still functions as the city's best park. The Vacaresti Lake nature park, southeast of the center, exists by accident: Ceausescu ordered a massive basin dug for a water feature, the project was abandoned after 1989, and nature colonized the excavation. It is now a 183-hectare urban wetland inside a capital city.