The new observation deck, handed over in the spring of 2018, was built on a height of strategic importance, with a particularly beautiful panorama: you can admire not only the entire Velencei lake, but also the Buda Mountains and the Vértes mountains, and even a tip of the Bakony, if the weather is clear enough.
Named after István Bencze, the first successful grape grower in the area, there was a lookout tower on Bence Hill until 1988, specifically a former oil drilling tower. In 1988, after a German tourist fell from it, it was blown up - it simply could not be demolished due to its structure, writes the local history publication "A Bence-hegyi kilátó" - so for three decades it was only from the top of the hill that the sprawling Venetians could be viewed below. lake However, the exceptional features of the place could not remain unused: at the end of 2014, a tender was called for a new observation deck, which was then opened in March 2018.
Based on the votes of the residents of Venice, the work of the couple Gábor-Merkel Tamás Kruppa could be built. Made of stone and colored concrete, it has a specific shape - submitted to the competition under the fantasy name "Concrete Flower", according to its megadreamers, it "displays the elemental forces of the beautiful landscape, reminiscent of a wind-blown tree, a bent leaf calyx, flower petals, fossils, perhaps the head of a snake or a hydrofoil". viewed from almost anywhere around Lake Velence, it immediately attracts attention. Its specialty is that it looks different from every direction.
There are 118 steps leading up to the almost 20-meter-high observation deck. When we step out of the closed stairwell, which presents the wildlife of the area in large-scale photographs, defying the usually very strong wind, onto the open terrace, a breathtaking 360-degree panorama unfolds before us. Only in the northern direction, the view is slightly obstructed by the direct neighbor of Bence-hegy, the 351-meter-high Meleg-hegy; from here, you can see the whole of Lake Velencei, which seems unrealistically small and is colored with reeds on a large part of its surface, as far as the Dinnyési Fertő beyond the opposite peak.
Beneath us are the houses of Venice, and on the other side, the neatly lined up holiday homes of soldier Gárdony. To the north-northeast, in front of the low but rickety Csúcsos-hegy, Nadap, famous for its leveling mark, dominates the view, with the Neo-Gothic Church of St. Rosalia of Palermo, built in 1904, in the middle. To the northeast, from the gentle slopes of Cseplek Mountain, the heights of the Buda Mountains appear to the left, including Nagy-Kopasz and János-hegy, while the Százhalombatta oil refinery can be seen to the right. To the north, in the gap between Temple Hill and Csúcsos Hill, the contour of the eastern edge of Vértes can be seen, and to the northwest, on a clear day, we can glimpse the distant mountains of Bakony.
Translated by Google •
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