About Mount Trashmore Park
Mount Trashmore is exactly what its name suggests, except the trash is hidden beneath grass, trails, playgrounds, and one of Virginia Beach’s most popular public parks.
During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Virginia Beach converted a 640,000-ton pile of garbage into what the city describes as the nation’s first landfill park. The waste was compacted beneath layers of clean soil, forming an artificial mountain roughly sixty feet high and 800 feet long.
The finished park turned a disposal site into usable landscape. Mount Trashmore now contains walking paths, recreational areas, playgrounds, lakes, and a smaller artificial rise called Encore Hill. From the surface, very little about the maintained green slopes announces what created the elevation.
The name does that work instead. Plenty of former landfills have been redeveloped, but few became beloved civic landmarks while retaining a title that essentially tells visitors they are standing on hundreds of thousands of tons of buried garbage.