Újpalota

For the Romanian village of Palota, called Újpalota in Hungarian, see Sântandrei.

Újpalota is the second largest microdistrict in Budapest, Hungary. It belongs to the District XV.

In 1968 a new residential area was created on the northeastern border of Budapest, in a field, near the Szilas-patak (Szilas Brook) that was named Újpalota (lit. "Newcastle"). The new housing estate was built from 1968 to 1977. This is one of the biggest housing estates of Budapest (15,454 apartments, more than 60,000 inhabitants in the 1980s, mostly young pairs with two children, it was the typical in Kádár's Hungary). Today only 36.000 people live here (2001),^[1] because former children grew up and moved to another part of the metropolitan area. The tall, prefabricated housing blocks are typical of the socialist era but the rich vegetation made the district more friendly in the past decades. The biggest Chinese shopping plaza in Hungary, the huge Asia Center was built on the bank of the Szilas Brook in 2003.