This year's 10-year-old Liget Budapest Project received the award for Europe's best leading tourism development at the prestigious World Travel Award's award ceremony, Benedek Gyorgyevics, the CEO of Városliget Zrt. responsible for the implementation of the project, told MTI on Monday.

By winning the recognition also known as the "tourism Oscar", the continent's most complex cultural urban development has earned itself the rank of the best European tourism development in the world. The renovation of the Liget has scaled itself up with the world's most popular new tourist attractions, where

it proved to be the best on the continent based on the votes of both the jury and the audience,

ahead of Spanish, Portuguese and German competitors. The World Travel Awards is one of the most prestigious awards in the international travel, tourism and hospitality industry, which

every year, out of thousands of players, it rewards the best in the sector

they wrote.

According to the announcement, Benedek Gyorgyevics said: it is a huge honor that the Liget Budapest Project was chosen as Europe's leading tourism development at one of the world's most important tourism competitions, the World Travel Awards. He added: already in the planning phase of the renovation of the Park, one of their primary goals was to make the park, as a tourist attraction, one of the "must-see" points for those coming to Budapest. Based on the increasing number of foreign visitors to the House of Hungarian Music, the Museum of Ethnography or the Balloon Observatory, it can be seen that it has been put on the international tourist map.

The long-term goal is for the park to be constantly renewed with cultural content and recreational experiences that make it worth a trip to Budapest in itself.

and to spend a longer time here, even to return again and again, he said.

The World Travel Awards was founded in 1993 to recognize and reward the best initiatives and developments in all sectors of the international travel, tourism and hospitality industry. This year, the awards were given for the thirtieth time, which have now become one of the most important measures of value for all areas related to tourism.

The CEO explained:

in the first ten years of the Liget Budapest Project, our centuries-old cultural institutions were renewed, and next to them, the most exciting contemporary buildings in the world were built.

Thanks to the developments, the tourist attraction of Hungary has increased significantly, and the new contemporary grove buildings have become internationally known landmarks of the country. The fact that the first decade of the renovation of the City Park has already won more than two dozen prestigious international awards contributed to all of this. The current recognition of the World Travel Awards also confirms that Budapest's number one family adventure park - with the Great Amphitheater in Városliget, the impressive House of Hungarian Music and the Museum of Ethnography - has a place among the best tourist destinations in the world, he said.

This is one of the special features of the Liget project: here the 150-year-old institutions coexist peacefully with the new ones and form a living system, while nature and the park surround them with experience functions and recreational opportunities. There is no such thing anywhere else in the world, and at the professional exhibitions and conferences dealing with international urban development, everyone raises their heads - he underlined.

International professional attention has been focused on the Liget Budapest Project since its inception, due to its scale and complexity

Europe's largest cultural investment today.

In 2019, the Magyar Zene Háza won the "Best International Public Building" award at the International Property Awards (IPA), and in 2021 it was chosen as the world's best music-themed real estate development at the Music Cities Awards. In 2018, the new Museum of Ethnography also became the best public building in the world at the International Property Awards, and even received the World's Best Architecture special award. And in 2021, the National Museum Restoration and Storage Center (OMRRK) won the "Europe's best public building development" award at the International Property Awards, making the Liget Budapest Project the most awarded development in the history of the award (IPA), as it is the first such cultural urban development, the elements of which won three prestigious awards. In 2017 in Cannes, at MIPIM, the world's most important real estate event, the Liget Budapest Project became Europe's best major urban development project in the Best Futura Mega Project category presenting the most comprehensive developments. And in the summer of 2021, the largest-scale renovation of the Museum of Fine Arts in the history of the Liget Budapest project won the Europa Nostra Award, which is the European Union's most prestigious recognition for heritage protection. 2022 was about the accolades of the House of Hungarian Music, by winning the main prize of the MIPIM Awards, it achieved one of the biggest international successes of domestic real estate development and became the building with the most accolades in Hungary. It won the German Design Council Iconic Award, the Architecture Masterpize Architectural Design of the Year recognition, it was included in the list of the most influential international attractions of 2023 by the Patina Architectural Digest Magazine, and Time Magazine, together with the Ethnographic Museum, selected it as the World's Greatest to its collection called Places, which determines the travel decisions of its millions of readers. In 2023, the Liget Budapest Project also won its first tourism-themed award, which was chosen as the best tourism development in the world at the International Travel Awards, they wrote.

MTI

Photo: House of Hungarian Music/Source/Városliget Zrt.