Parliament Palace (Casa Poporului), Bucharest

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This building is testimony to Ceausescu's madness. It is the second largest administrative building in the world and led to Ceausescu razing large parts of Bucharest to build it. It was still not finished at the time of his execution. We did not go inside as we did not want to prebook and hang around waiting for an organized tour. One thing you can say is it is certainly big.

If you are planing to visit Bucharest,then Parliament Palace (Palatul Parlamentului or Casa Poporului) it's a must see.
This building it's amazing,dominates everything around her,but don't forget to take lots of picture.
When i first saw her,i just wanted to stay there for hours,and to look at every corner of this building.
Three reason for visiting this "monster" would be : is the largest civilian administrative building in the world, the heaviest building in the world and the most expensive administrative building in the world
How to get there?The easiest way would be with the subway; the name of the station is Izvor.
Also,near this building you can find the Izvor Park(Parcul Izvor)(after you walked around Casa Poporului,there's nothing better than rest on a bench)
You can enter in this building,(organized groups-or you will have to wait until a group is formed,you can visit this only with a guide from Casa Poporului,don't think that you are let to walk alone in this huge building)every day,between 10:00-16:00,the ticket cost about 6 Euro; it takes about 1 hour and half-2 hours to visit the inside,but you will not have access to all chambers.To take pictures in there you have to pay a tax of 30 Lei(= 7,05 Euro).You can choose between standard tour or complete tour.
Very Important: do not leave the group, you don't want to get lost inside it.

Ana Maria was our touristic guide and she used to give personal opinions about a part of the history of Rumania.That never happens in Spain¡ You only have to inform sizes, years, names etc but never try to make a politic speech to the people you are receiving like ¿guest?.
You can not talk about the Pentagon (working like guide) and comment president Roosvelt was a socialist or genocide etc. or even he was a wonderfull person.Politic is politic.History is what everyone want to know when you visit a museum or any building aroun the world.So she didn´t respect some of the visitors we are over¡.I requested a complaint sheet and they didn´t give me anything.Only a piece of paper that has to be in the trush right now¡ .A really bad experience.NEVER AGAIN THANK YOU¡¡¡¡

Familiarize yourself with the rich, opulent beauty of this most fascinating of cities. See the Parliament Palace (Ceausescu House) - one of the most impressive building in the world after Pentagon -
Vilage Museum, the State Opera and the National Museum.
Cross the Dambovita River and wonder at the Old Town Square, with its baroque buildings and cobblestone streets, refreshing "Litlle Paris "Flavour.
There is wonderful architecture to admire and an intriguing history to discover.

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The 4 million sq. ft. Parliament is the second-largest building in the world. It has 1100 rooms in its 12 stories. Ceaucescu started it in 1984, but it wasn’t finished by the time he and his wife were executed. Construction caused 40,000 people to be moved from their homes, and its costs helped bankrupt the country. The government considered tearing the building down, but realized it was cheaper to complete it. The parliament only occupies 9% of the building; most of the remainder is empty.

All the materials are Romanian, and the finest that money could buy. The conference room has a 5-ton crystal chandelier and leather seats. The silk tapestries came from silkworms brought to Romania and cared for by schoolchildren. The largest carpet (10 tons) was woven on the spot; others came in pieces and were carefully sewn together Nuns “volunteered” to make the draperies. The biggest room is 2200 square meters; the second biggest seats 1500. The huge empty frames in one room were to hold pictures of Ceauºescu and his wife.

The balcony, where Ceaucescu was going to give his speeches, overlooks Constitution Square and Union Avenue. The avenue, at right angles to the building, is very wide and has 42 fountains (all different) down the center. They represent the 41 counties of Romania, plus one for Bucharest. The square and the boulevard together could hold 300,000 people.

Other civic buildings and nice apartments for party officials, etc. are across the square. They are very different from the big "boxes" built to house the rural people brought in to work in factories.

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I don’t know if you’ve heard but Bucharest holds the dubious record of having the biggest Parliament building in the world, which is also the second largest administrative building in the world after the Pentagon. It truly is as big as a dictator’s ego. Bucharest’s Palace of Parliament was built during the Ceauşescu’s regime and it was designed as the seat of his political power. He also intended to use the building as his personal residence. Construction began in 1984 and at the time of Ceauşescu’s death in 1989 it was not completely finished. He never got to move in.

The Palace of Parliament was and still is a controversial building. Some people think of it as shameful, an architectural horror while others are proud of its records and consider it the biggest tourist attraction in Bucharest. I tend to side with those who don’t like the building, which in my eyes represents the peak of Ceausescu’s megalomania. Many old beautiful buildings were demolished to make way for this pointlessly massive “house” (Parliament’s Palace used to be called "The House of the People" during the communist regime). To quote wikipedia, “much of Bucharest’s historic district, including 19 Orthodox Christian churches, six Jewish synagogues, three Protestant churches (plus eight relocated churches), and 30,000 residences” were demolished to create the space necessary for this project. I remember a joke that was going around at the time: the boulevard that ends with the Parliament Palace was to be called “The Victory of Socialism”. The joke’s punchline was that in fact the name of the boulevard is “The Victory of Socialism against Bucharest”.

Unfortunatelly I read somewhere that this building is indeed the biggest tourist attraction in Bucharest. Seems like people like records of this sort. I visited the building once, when they opened it for public in 1990; I remember some huge rooms, the dimensions being so excessive that nothing else was noticeable. Today the building houses the Romanian Parliament, as well as the National Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC) opened in 2004 inside the west wing. It can be visited by guided tours.

This is the pride and joy of my country. It was built between 1927 and 1937 in neoclassical style, the palace was home to King Carol II and to his son, King Mihai I, until 1947, when the monarchy was abolished in Romania. It was inside the halls of this palace that King Mihai, aged 18, led a coup that displaced the pro-Nazi government during the World War II and put Romania on the Allies' side. Today, the former Royal palace houses the Romanian National Art Museum Today it houses our parliament.

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Of all the city’s landmarks the Parliament Palace is certainly the most famous.
It was built by will of Romania’s infamous dictator, but the man never used it because when the revolution changed everything, in 1989, this palace was far from complete. The people took possession of this palace and turned it into a symbol of Romania’s democracy. Its name changed from “House of the Republic” to “House of the People” and finally to “Palace of Parliament”. In fact it hosts the Chamber of Deputies, the Constitutional Court and the Legislative Council.
It was this palace that made me agree with the definition of Bucharest as a “Little Paris”, because when I visited the interior I was in some ways reminded of a visit I had paid to Paris’s Hotel de Ville. The two palaces were built one century apart and the exteriors could not be more different, but when I visited the interiors I saw the same concept behind both of them. The builders of the Hotel de Ville in Paris had this idea in mind: ‘this will be the symbolic home of our republic, and consequently of our people, so no effort will be spared to make this building as rich and luxurious as any royal palace!’ This is precisely the idea that the interiors of Bucharest’s Parliament Palace conveyed to me. I saw it in the lavish use of the best Romanian marble, the grand chandeliers made by the best Romanian glass-makers, the curtains made with the best Romanian silk and gold-thread lace. It can be said that its style is full of rhetoric, but this is a rhetoric that I can understand and agree with.

My main picture here shows the conference room that now is named “Hall of Human Rights”, which was, by the way, the only one completed before the revolution. The other pictures show examples of what I was referring to when I wrote about marble, chandeliers and silk.

The palace is open for visits every day from 10:00 to 16:00.