Elisabeth Park, Protected heritage park in Koekelberg, Belgium.
Elisabeth Park is a 17-hectare public park on the Koekelberg Plateau, laid out as a double avenue with a wide grassy central median flanked by side lawns, groves and shrubs. Sycamore maples line the main avenue on the Avenue du Panthéon side, while plane trees line Boulevard Léopold II. At its head stands the National Basilica of the Sacred Heart, whose green dome and twin towers rise above the trees.
The Koekelberg council approved the park on 8 December 1868 on plans by architect and urbanist Victor Besme, with land given free by the Compagnie foncière du Quartier Royal de Koekelberg. That company's 1877 bankruptcy delayed work, which began only in 1880; the park was inaugurated in 1891. From 1905 the Basilica of the Sacred Heart rose on the site, and in the 1950s a motorway cut the park in two until the Annie Cordy Tunnel restored its unity in 1985.
The park's name honours Queen Elisabeth, wife of King Albert I; it was first called Parc de Koekelberg, and the section around the basilica was the Parc du Sacré-Coeur. Since 2004 hundreds of ring-necked parakeets, accidentally released, have gathered in the trees almost every evening, flying into the city by day to feed. The Festival Plazey is held here in summer, and from 1992 to 2006 the park hosted the first fourteen editions of the Spanish Euroferia festival.
The park can be entered from four different points: Avenue du Panthéon, Avenue Émile Bossaert, Avenue des Gloires Nationales, and Boulevard Léopold II. Visitors can choose their entry based on where they are approaching from.
The space was originally planned to house a national pantheon before those designs were abandoned for the Sacred Heart Basilica. This shift reveals how the city's priorities changed in the late 1800s.
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