Hortobágy National Park
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How it came to be
Hortobagy is a stretch of grassland and wetland of nearly 75,000 ha on the Great Hungarian Plain in the east of the country. Nomads who arrived from the east around 2000 BC left burial mounds, called kurgans, on dry ground near water. Low tells mark settlements going back to the Neolithic.
The Hungarians settled around the Tisza River at the end of the 9th century. By the early 13th century a dense string of villages living from herding lay along the route from Debrecen to Tiszafured, but depopulation began in the 14th century and the villages disappeared. After that the only buildings were light, temporary shelters of reed and branches.
In the 18th and early 19th centuries the stone and brick Nine Arch Bridge and roadside inns called csardas were built. River regulation along the Tisza from the mid-19th century drained former wetlands, and fishponds were dug in 1914-1918 and again in the 1950s. Hortobagy became Hungary's first national park and was inscribed in 1999 as a cultural landscape shaped by a pastoral society.
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