A Time-Travel Photo Exhibition Lands in City Hall Park for Budapest Zoo’s 160th Birthday

Budapest has no shortage of open-air art, but this one comes with a birthday cake attached. To celebrate the 160th anniversary of the Budapest Zoo and Botanical Garden, a free outdoor photo exhibition has taken over a stretch of City Hall Park right in the city center, and it’s open to absolutely anyone strolling through until August 30. If you’re wandering around downtown Budapest this month, it’s an easy, unexpected stop that tells the story of one of the city’s oldest and most beloved institutions through more than a century and a half of images.

A Walk Through 160 Years of Zoo History

The exhibition is built around sixteen distinct themes, each one unpacking a different chapter of the zoo’s story since it first opened its gates. Visitors can trace everything from the architectural legacy of Károly Kós, the influential Hungarian architect whose designs still shape parts of the zoo today, to intimate portraits of the animals that generations of Budapest families have grown up visiting. Other panels dig into the tougher side of zoo work, including the challenges of wildlife rescue, alongside more atmospheric collages capturing how the grounds transform through the seasons. The overall effect is less like a static museum display and more like flipping through a very large, very public family photo album that happens to belong to the whole city.

The Budapest Zoo and Botanical Garden ranks among the oldest zoological institutions in the world, and 2026 marks its 160th year in operation, a milestone the institution has been celebrating throughout the year with festivals, archival poster displays, and now this large-scale photo collection in City Hall Park. Mayor Gergely Karácsony reportedly called the zoo’s history one of Budapest’s most beautiful stories during the anniversary celebrations held at the zoo itself earlier in August.

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Who’s Behind the Exhibition

The photo exhibition was put together by the Zoo Foundation, and its official unveiling brought together some notable names in the city’s cultural and civic life. Ambrus Kiss, Chief Executive Officer of the Municipality of Budapest, joined Dr. Endre Sós, General Director of the Budapest Zoo and Botanical Garden, and Éva Montskó, chair of the Zoo Foundation’s board of trustees, for a joint viewing of the collages when the display opened. Their presence underlines just how significant this anniversary is considered within Budapest’s cultural calendar, treating the zoo not just as a tourist attraction but as a genuine piece of the city’s shared heritage.

Where to Find It and How Long You Have

The exhibition sits along the Károly Boulevard side of City Hall Park, making it easy to reach whether you’re coming from Deák Ferenc Square, the Great Synagogue, or any of the shops and cafés lining the surrounding streets in the city center. Because it’s fully outdoors and free to view at any hour, there’s no ticket to buy and no opening times to plan around, though the natural light of late afternoon tends to make the photo collages pop the most for anyone hoping to snap a few pictures of their own. The display runs only through August 30, so travelers visiting Budapest in the second half of August have a narrow but very manageable window to catch it before it comes down.

Worth Pairing With a Zoo Visit

Given that the exhibition exists to mark the zoo’s anniversary, it makes sense to treat City Hall Park as a preview rather than the main event. The Budapest Zoo and Botanical Garden itself, located over in City Park near the Biodome and Széchenyi Baths, has been running its own jubilee programming throughout 2026, including archival poster displays along its main pathways and a special weekend festival that drew crowds for cake and celebrations earlier this August. Seeing the City Hall Park exhibition first adds a layer of historical context that makes an actual visit to the zoo grounds feel even richer, especially for anyone curious about how a 19th-century menagerie evolved into the modern conservation-focused institution it is today.

For visitors piecing together a few days in Budapest, this is the kind of low-effort, high-reward stop that rewards curiosity: no admission fee, no long detour, just a genuinely well-curated slice of the city’s history sitting quietly in a park most tourists already walk through anyway.