Hortobágy National Park

Hortobágy National Park covers an area of more than 800 square kilometres on the eastern side of the Great Hungarian Plain, protecting the most extensive surviving fragment of the Puszta — the flat, open grassland steppe that once covered much of the Carpathian Basin before the draining and cultivation of the marshes and the enclosure of the grasslands fundamentally altered the landscape in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The park's territory is one of the most sparsely populated areas in Hungary, with a landscape defined by the horizon-to-horizon sky, by the long shadows cast by individual trees and small copses, and by the quality of the light that sweeps across the flat terrain and can change character within minutes as clouds move across the plain, a landscape that feels both ancient and vulnerable.

The characteristic features of the Puszta landscape within the park are the wide expanse of alkaline grassland interspersed with marshland and shallow alkaline lakes, the herds of Hungarian Grey cattle and Racka sheep maintained in traditional transhumant fashion by local herders, and the Nine-Span Bridge — a nineteenth-century stone bridge that crosses the Hortobágy River and is one of the most photographed structures in Hungary — whose 182 metres of arches create a horizontal line across the flat landscape and provide a useful scale reference for the vastness of the surrounding plain. The bridge is part of the historical infrastructure of the Puszta that was built during the eighteenth century to support the movement of livestock and goods across the marshy river valleys.

The alkaline lakes and marshlands of the park support one of the most important concentrations of birdlife in Central Europe: more than 320 species have been recorded within the park, including large breeding colonies of wading birds and significant populations of cranes and geese during the spring and autumn migrations that bring hundreds of thousands of birds through the park in a few weeks each year. The flatness of the terrain and the scarcity of human settlement make the area attractive to ground-nesting birds, and the park has constructed a network of observation towers and hides that allow visitors to watch the birdlife at close range without disturbing the breeding colonies, with the crane migration in September and October being one of the most spectacular wildlife events in Hungary.

The traditional animal husbandry practices maintained within the park — herding Hungarian Grey cattle and Racka sheep using the long whip and the voice, with the cowherds riding without stirrups in a style that has survived essentially unchanged for centuries — form the living cultural core of a landscape that is otherwise best understood as a historical ecosystem maintained by human activity rather than preserved in a natural state. The horse shows put on for visitors in the park's main tourist area demonstrate the traditional Puszta equestrian culture: horses worked individually or in small teams, guided at speed through intricate patterns by a single handler using a long whip as an extension of the arm, a skill developed over centuries of herding on the open plain.

The experience of the park for most visitors is defined by the scale and emptiness of the landscape: the view from any elevated point — and there are very few — extends for tens of kilometres across the flat plain to a tree line or a low horizon, a prospect that is difficult to find in any other European lowland landscape and that gives visitors a physical sense of the vastness of the Carpathian Basin as it was before the enclosure and drainage of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries changed it permanently. The park preserves something of that original character, and the silence — broken only by wind, bird calls and the occasional horse — is as much a part of the experience as any single feature.

It is the largest national park in Hungary and protects the most significant surviving fragment of the original Puszta steppe, a landscape type that has almost entirely disappeared from the rest of Europe.

The birdlife, particularly the crane migration in September and October, is one of the most spectacular wildlife events in Central Europe, with hundreds of thousands of birds passing through in a few weeks.

The traditional Puszta animal husbandry practices maintained within the park offer a living connection to the equestrian and pastoral culture that shaped the Carpathian Basin for a thousand years.