Listen to the wetland that grew in Ceaușescu's lake

Before the works, the site of the park was gardens and spring-fed ponds; according to the study behind its protection, the owners were still working their gardens in 1988. Văcărești Monastery, founded in the 1720s on the hill beside it, was demolished in 1986; according to the Romanian daily Jurnalul, Nicolae Ceaușescu, Romania's communist leader, visited the site in December 1986, after the demolition.

The land was expropriated in 1988–89, and the dike and basin were finished in 1989: about 155 hectares of floor inside 26 hectares of dike, concreted on the inner face. The water was to come from the Argeș river, through Lake Mihăilești west of the city, along a 27-kilometre channel of which 14 kilometres were built. What the lake was for is still unclear: sources speak of water for a planned Danube port, irrigation for greenhouses, or a leisure lake; some texts, citing no source, add flood defence. We found no engineering document that settles it.

After the December 1989 revolution that ended communist rule, the site was abandoned. The water was already there: the spring-fed ponds, plus the pits dug for the dike's earth. The founding study says the basin was filled once, by pumping from the Dâmbovița, the river that runs through Bucharest, and that the water seeped under the dike into nearby greenhouses; we found no record of the episode from the time. In the images from July 1990 and August 1991, nearly a third of the floor shows wet or under shallow water.

In the years that followed, reeds covered almost everything. In 2002 the Romanian government approved leasing the land for 49 years to a company promising a culture and sports complex; in 2005 a court ruled the leasing decision illegal, and the government appealed. In May 2012 National Geographic Romania called the place "the delta between the tower blocks", and on 11 May 2016 the government declared it a nature park, Romania's first urban nature park. The Enache family, who lived in the marsh for nearly 20 years and had to leave once the park was declared, is the subject of the documentary "Acasă, My Home" (2020).

The satellite images also show what came next. Water visible from space covered 5–10% of the floor between 2001 and 2011 and fell below 1% from 2020. The park administration says the water level depends mainly on rainfall; the association blames drought and the reeds, which hold water "like a sponge". At the end of 2024 the administration said water had again covered the vegetation at the edges. The management plan approved in May 2025 provides for a channel from the Dâmbovița. Pixels 30 metres wide miss small pools and the water under the reeds.