One Country Built a Seven-Kilometre Park Along the Sea, the Other Just Has the Actual Sea

🇦🇿 Azerbaijan 🇹🇴 Tonga

By Suki Nakamura, Out of Office

Some countries build their green space. Others simply exist inside it. Baku spent decades and, by most estimates, an enormous amount of oil money constructing the Baku Boulevard, a manicured, fountain-studded, meticulously landscaped seaside promenade that stretches for kilometres along the Caspian and functions as the city's collective front garden. Tonga, meanwhile, didn't need to build anything, because roughly the entire archipelago is a green space, coconut palms and beach and volcanic hillside doing the work that Baku's landscaping budget spent years trying to replicate in concrete planters.

I've walked both, the Boulevard at golden hour with a Baku local who treats an evening stroll there as a near-religious ritual, and a Tongan beach where "going to the park" isn't really a sentence anyone needs to say because you're already standing in what would be, anywhere else, prime real estate parkland. One is a triumph of deliberate urban planning. The other is a masterclass in not needing urban planning at all.

Do's & Don'ts: Azerbaijan

Do's & Don'ts: Tonga

Azerbaijan: A Boulevard Built to Be Bragged About

The Baku Boulevard is, structurally, an act of civic self-esteem. Stretching roughly along the Caspian waterfront, it's been expanded repeatedly since Soviet times into a genuinely impressive corridor of fountains, rose gardens, cafes, an amusement park, and a promenade wide enough to accommodate the entire city's evening walking habit simultaneously. And Bakuvians use it, constantly, seriously, as a core piece of daily social infrastructure rather than an occasional weekend outing.

What surprised me is how formal the whole ritual feels. This isn't a scruffy jog-and-dog-walk park culture, it's an evening promenade in the older European sense, families out in their good clothes, groups of friends parading slowly past the fountains, elderly couples on benches watching everyone else parade. There's an unmistakable performative quality to it, the Boulevard is where you go to see Baku and be seen by Baku, and locals dress and behave accordingly.

The oil wealth is visible everywhere in the landscaping, precisely trimmed hedges, elaborate fountain displays timed to music some evenings, an infrastructure investment that could only exist in a capital with genuinely serious money to spend on aesthetics. It's beautiful, undeniably, but there's also something a little telling about a city that built an entire seven-kilometre park essentially from scratch, on reclaimed and redeveloped waterfront, rather than simply having green space occur naturally. Baku's relationship with nature is curated, intentional, and, frankly, a little bit showing off, in the most charming possible way.

Tonga: Green Space That Never Needed a Planning Committee

Tonga has no equivalent conversation to have, because the entire concept of a designated "park" barely applies when palm-lined beaches, volcanic ridgelines, and dense tropical bush are simply the ambient condition of existing on any of its 170-odd islands. There's no landscaping budget because there's no need for one. The "park," if you insist on using the word, is wherever you happen to be standing that isn't indoors.

This produces a completely different relationship with outdoor space, one built around customary land ownership rather than public access rules. A huge amount of Tongan land, including plenty of what looks like an obviously public beach to an outsider, is actually tied to specific family or village claims going back generations, and the polite move is always to ask before you settle in with a picnic, not because anyone's especially precious about it, but because acknowledgment matters more than paperwork in Tongan land culture.

Sunday changes everything, genuinely. Tonga takes its Sabbath observance seriously, more seriously than almost anywhere else I've experienced, and most commercial outdoor activity, market stalls, tours, even some beach facilities, simply stops. It's not a suggestion, it's closer to a societal reset button, and newcomers who plan a big Sunday beach outing full of vendors and rented equipment are quietly reminded that Tonga's green space runs on its own calendar, not a tourist's.

There's also a total absence of the performative dressing-up quality Baku has in spades. Nobody's out on a Tongan beach to be seen in their good clothes, quite the opposite, modesty norms mean swimwear stays firmly at the water's edge and daily outdoor life is practical, unfussy, and entirely unconcerned with anyone's Instagram-worthy promenade outfit.

The Verdict

Baku wins on sheer engineered spectacle, proof of what a determined city with serious capital can build from nothing but reclaimed waterfront and civic ambition. Tonga wins on the thing money genuinely cannot manufacture: an entire archipelago that simply is the green space, no landscaping required, no committee approvals, just volcanic soil and salt air doing what they've always done. If you want to promenade in your finest evening wear past a choreographed fountain display, Baku delivers spectacularly. If you want to remember that "park" was originally just a word for "outside, but nice," Tonga will happily, quietly, correct your entire framework.

What Nobody Warned You About

Quora — "What is the Baku Boulevard actually like day to day?" paraphrased: a resident said locals genuinely plan outfits around an evening Boulevard walk, and that showing up in gym clothes gets you quietly noticed as an outsider.

expat.com Baku forum, paraphrased: a newcomer was surprised how strict some park areas were about alcohol, describing a picnic that had to be relocated after a polite but firm word from park staff.

Quora — "Is there a real park culture in Tonga or is it all beach?" paraphrased: a longtime visitor explained that asking a local "whose land is this" before setting up anywhere isn't awkward, it's expected, and it's usually met with genuine warmth once you do.

Conclusion

Green space says a lot about what a country's had to work with and what it's chosen to make of it. Azerbaijan turned oil wealth into a fountain-lined promenade built to impress. Tonga never had to try, the whole place simply is the park, run on customary land rights and a Sunday shutdown no landscaping budget could ever replicate. One is a triumph of civic ambition. The other is a reminder that sometimes nature just got there first and did a better job.