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 semi-circle connecting two bridges of the Danube, Margaret Bridge on the north and Petőfi Bridge on the south. Usually the part inside and around this semi-circle is counted as the downtown of Budapest (see Belváros).
Meaning
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).
Location
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). The three existing metro lines have four stations on Nagykörút, at the junctions of the above four roads: (from north to south) Nyugati pályaudvar (no. 3), Oktogon (no. 1), Blaha Lujza tér (no. 2) and Ferenc körút (no. 3 again). Metro line 4 is going to have a station on Nagykörút (at Rákóczi tér), too.
Features, notable spots
On the Nagykörút one can find (from north to south) the [[Comedy Theatre (Budapest|]] (Vígszínház, 1896), Western Railway Station (Nyugati pályaudvar), 1877, built by Gustave Eiffel's team), the New York Café (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 West End 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. Its trams (no. 4 and 6), a unique type in Budapest, are to be replaced in 2006-2007 probably by Siemens vehicles, the longest ones in Europe. The tram line itself dates back to 1887.
Further ring roads in Budapest
There are two further ring roads in Budapest:
- the Small Boulevard (Kiskörút), with the length of about 1.5 km, inside the semi-circle of Nagykörút (including Károly körút, Múzeum körút and Vámház körút), which follows the line of the demolished city walls of medieval Pest (remaining parts of this wall can still be found in the internal courtyards of several residential buildings on Múzeum körút),
- and an even bigger ring road outside Nagykörút, which is, however, not thought of as a single entity (it includes Róbert Károly körút, Hungária körút and Könyves Kálmán körút).