Benjakitti Park

What it is

Benjakitti Park is a 450-rai forest park in Khlong Toei, wedged between Ratchadaphisek Road, the Queen Sirikit National Convention Center and the back of the Sukhumvit office district, and it is the most ambitious piece of public landscape Bangkok has built in a generation. The Bangkok Metropolitan Administration describes it as a lung for the city that also builds a complete natural ecosystem, conserves native plants and takes on the district's flooding and water pollution, designed so that people, animals and nature benefit from one another. It occupies land that belonged to the Tobacco Authority of Thailand; the older lake park honouring Queen Sirikit opened in 2004, and the forest park that now surrounds it — wetland rather than lawn, with elevated walkways instead of paths at ground level — opened fully in 2022. The result is a park you walk above as often as through, and the only place in central Bangkok where a visitor can spend an hour among 300-odd native plant species without leaving the traffic behind by more than a few hundred metres.

Checked 2026-08-25 · Source

What's inside

The design keeps 1,733 of the trees that were already on the site and adds 7,155 new ones, with four ponds able to hold up to 128,000 cubic metres of water and more than 300 species of local plants, which makes the park a working reference collection of Thai native and rare species as much as a place to walk. The structure that defines it is a 1.6-kilometre skywalk threading the zones and the ponds and joining the green bridge across to Lumphini Park. At ground level there is a 5.8-kilometre nature walk, a 2.8-kilometre running route and a 3.4-kilometre cycling route; duck boats and kayaks on the water; a playground, a dog park opposite the car park beside Gate 1 on the Ratchada side, and a street skateboard rink. An old tobacco warehouse has been converted into an indoor sports centre covering seven sports — basketball, street basketball, badminton, futsal, table tennis, pickleball and tekball — for which the BMA requires courts to be booked in advance through its Bangkok Sports website. The museum building holds an exhibition in honour of Queen Sirikit centred on her forestry work, with a herbarium of plant species named for her including the Kitiyakara orchid, and can take up to 3,000 users. There is also a demonstration rice field growing five-coloured rice.

Checked 2026-08-25 · Source

How long to spend

Allow ninety minutes. That is enough to walk the skywalk end to end, drop to ground level for a circuit of the ponds and come back — roughly the 5.8-kilometre nature walk at an unhurried pace with stops — without turning the visit into exercise. Runners doing the 2.8-kilometre route and cyclists on the 3.4-kilometre one need far less; a family with the playground, the duck boats and the rice field will use two and a half hours easily, and anyone crossing the green bridge to Lumphini Park should treat that as a separate visit rather than an extension. Ninety minutes is the figure recorded for this page.

Checked 2026-08-25

Season and crowds

Benjakitti Park is open every day from 04.30 to 22.00, and cycling is permitted only between 06.00 and 17.30. Those hours are the whole answer to when to come: the park opens before dawn and closes late precisely because the usable hours in Bangkok are the ones at either end of the day. The first ninety minutes after opening are cool, quiet and the best light on the water; the last two hours before closing are the busiest, when the office district empties into it. Between roughly 11.00 and 15.00 the skywalk is exposed and there is little shade on it, which is the one design weakness of walking a wetland from above. In the rainy season the ponds are doing their job and the park is at its greenest; in the cool months from November the early mornings are genuinely pleasant rather than merely bearable.

Checked 2026-08-25 · Source

Tickets

No admission is recorded for Benjakitti Park. The Bangkok Metropolitan Administration's own park page carries a service-fee field and leaves it empty, so the fee is not stated by the operator and this page does not assert one; nothing else the BMA publishes for the park names a charge either. One facility inside the park is explicitly not first-come-first-served: the indoor sports centre in the converted tobacco warehouse must be booked in advance through the BMA's Bangkok Sports website, and the dog park requires registration and adherence to its posted rules. The park's published contact number is 02 254 1263.

Checked 2026-08-25 · Source

Getting there

The park's address is Ratchadaphisek Road, Khlong Toei subdistrict, Khlong Toei District, Bangkok 10110, next to the Queen Sirikit National Convention Center. The BMA lists three approaches. By rail, the MRT Blue Line serves both Queen Sirikit National Convention Centre station and Sukhumvit station, and the BTS Sukhumvit Line stops at Asok, which interchanges with Sukhumvit MRT. By bus, routes 45, 46, 109, 115, 116 and 136 serve it, along with several of the Po-prefixed routes. By car, take the expressway from Phloen Chit towards Rama 4 Road and enter and leave via Ratchadaphisek Road; parking is available at the park. The convention-centre MRT exit is the shortest walk of the three and puts a visitor at the northern end, near Gate 1 and the dog park.

Checked 2026-08-25 · Source

What to watch out for

The BMA posts a specific list of prohibitions and enforces them: no drone flying, no smoking, no alcohol or intoxicants, no gambling, no indecent behaviour, no trading or exchange of goods, and no damaging the trees. Visitors who assume a big public park is a relaxed place about drones in particular will be stopped. The cycling window is the second trap — bicycles are allowed only from 06.00 to 17.30, so an evening rider arriving at seven with a rented bike has nowhere to ride it. The skywalk carries the most foot traffic and has almost no shade; carry water, because there is a great deal more walking here than the map suggests once the elevated route is added to the ground one. The dog park is not simply open: registration and compliance with its rules are required. Finally, the park's own geography confuses people — it has several gates on different roads and the walk between the Ratchada gate and the convention-centre side is long, so pick the entrance before setting off rather than after arriving.

Checked 2026-08-25 · Source

Photography

Drones are banned outright by the BMA's posted rules, which removes the shot most photographers want of a wetland park and makes the 1.6-kilometre skywalk the substitute: it is the elevated viewpoint, and it looks down on the ponds, the reed beds and the five-coloured demonstration rice field from an angle nothing at ground level offers. The 04.30 opening is the real gift here — Benjakitti is one of very few places in central Bangkok a photographer can legally stand in before sunrise, with the office towers of Asok and Sukhumvit stacked behind the water and mist sitting on the ponds in the cool months. Late afternoon reverses the composition and lights the towers instead. The converted tobacco warehouse and the museum building are the architectural subjects; inside the indoor sports centre, remember it is a booked venue in use rather than an exhibit.

Checked 2026-08-25 · Source

Where it is

• 1 hour

  12 min walk · เขตคลองเตย

  Benjasiri Park

  • Must see
  • Nature site

External links

• Official site
• View on Wikidata