Hortobágy National Park

Declared in 1973, it was Hungary's first national park and protects the puszta, the largest surviving stretch of natural steppe in Central Europe, a landscape shaped over centuries by the traditional grazing of Hungarian grey cattle and semi-wild horses. It has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1999 as a cultural landscape, in recognition of the thousand-year relationship between nomadic herders and the steppe ecosystem, and it is a critical migratory stop for more than 200,000 common cranes each autumn.