Two Parks Breathing Space Into a City Built on Concrete

A Park Named After Buddha's Birthplace, Donated by a King, Now Home to Giant Monitor Lizards -- Lumphini Park takes its name from Lumbini in present-day Nepal, the birthplace of the Buddha, a naming choice made when King Rama VI donated this royal land for public use in the early 20th century, creating Bangkok's first public park. Today the park is as well known for its resident population of Asian water monitor lizards, some growing well over a meter long, as for its green space itself; the lizards roam freely along the lake's edges and have become an unofficial symbol of the park, equally beloved and startling to first-time visitors. Set apart from the traffic and density of the surrounding Silom and Sathorn business districts, the park functions as one of the few places where Bangkok's air and noise noticeably change.

A Park Grown on the Ashes of a State Cigarette Factory -- Benjakitti Forest Park occupies land that once held the Thailand Tobacco Monopoly's cigarette manufacturing complex, a state-run factory that operated in the heart of the city for decades before being relocated and the site repurposed as green space beginning in the 1990s. The park expanded significantly in a major phase completed in 2022, adding a wetland forest section built around reclaimed water-treatment ponds that now host boardwalks winding through planted mangrove and swamp forest species, an unusual piece of constructed wetland ecology for a central business district. It sits directly beside the Queen Sirikit National Convention Center, so the park functions as a green buffer between Bangkok's financial and exhibition district and the elevated Benjakitti Park skywalk that connects to Lumphini Park beyond it, part of a broader effort to stitch together the CBD's fragmented green spaces.