The Victoria Palace
The seat of government along one side.
Joe Mabel — CC BY 3.0 · Bybbisch94, Christian Gebhardt — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Babu — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Mark Ahsmann — CC BY-SA 4.0
Piața Victoriei is a large junction north of central Bucharest where four main avenues meet, with the **Victoria Palace** — the seat of the Romanian government — along one side. The square itself is not beautiful: a wide roundabout ringed by buildings of different periods with heavy traffic. But it is **where Romanian politics happens**. Because it stands in front of the government, it has been the site of every major demonstration since 1989, best known the protests of 2017 against changes to the corruption laws, when more than three hundred thousand people came out in a single night — the largest gathering in Romania since the revolution. Practically it is a **transport node**: a main metro station where lines meet, with a direct connection to the airport. And three important museums stand minutes away on foot: the Grigore Antipa natural history museum, the Museum of the Romanian Peasant, and the National Geology Museum.
The seat of government along one side.
Antipa, the Romanian Peasant and Geology, minutes away.
Piața Victoriei, Bucharest
Grigore Antipa Natural History MuseumBucharest's best-loved museum for children and its most modern in display: the G1 minute walk4.9
The National Geology MuseumThe National Geology Museum occupies a building of 1906 on Kiseleff avenue, dire3 minutes walk4.3
Museum of the Romanian PeasantEuropean Museum of the Year 1996 and the Bucharest museum its own people love mo3 minutes walk4.5
The Museum of Ages, Filipescu-Cesianu HouseA museum in a nineteenth-century town mansion on Calea Victoriei with an unusual4 minutes walk4.8
The National Museum of Maps and Old BooksA museum specialising in historical maps and old books, in an early twentieth-ce9 minutes walk4.8The metro is the best option: four lines cover most of what a visitor wants, it is clean and cheap and unaffected by traffic, and the blue line links the airport directly to Piața Victoriei. Tickets are bought on a card at the gate or paid by contactless bank card. Trams and buses cover what the metro does not but are slow in traffic, and Bucharest's traffic is real. Taxis are cheap, but order one through an app rather than hailing it to avoid arguments over the fare. **Walking is excellent in the historic centre** and poor on the big boulevards — broken pavements with cars parked on them.