5 Days in Budapest

Start where Buda shops, at the Fény utca market next to Széll Kálmán tér, the tram and metro hub at the foot of Castle Hill. It's a working market rather than a sight: vegetable stalls, butchers selling kolbász (sausage) and hurka (blood and liver sausage) and paprika by the bag. It's closed on Sundays.

Get a pogácsa, a small savory scone, or a kakaós csiga, a cocoa swirl, from a bakery, and a coffee; Auguszt, one of the city's old pastry families, has its original shop right next to the market. Then walk up the steps from the square to the Vienna Gate, ten minutes and the gentlest way onto the hill.

Walk the quiet lanes of the Castle District, past the Vienna Gate and baroque houses, to Matthias Church. The church has stood here since the 13th century. King Matthias Corvinus married twice inside it, the Ottomans turned it into their main mosque for almost 150 years after 1541, and in 1867 Franz Joseph and Sisi were crowned King and Queen of Hungary here, sealing the Compromise that created Austria-Hungary; Liszt wrote his Coronation Mass for the day. The colorful roof tiles and painted walls inside date from Frigyes Schulek's restoration of 1874-96, and they're worth the ticket.

Behind it is the Fisherman's Bastion, seven white turrets for the seven Magyar tribes, built in 1895-1902 as a viewing terrace and never meant for defense. The Parliament and the whole of Pest lie across the river below you; the light on them is best in the late afternoon, but the crowds are thinnest now. The lower terraces are free; the upper turrets charge in the middle of the day.

Ten minutes south along the hill is the Buda Castle palace, first built after the Mongol invasion of 1241 and the main royal seat from the late 1300s, rebuilt so many times that almost nothing you see is older than the 1700s. The siege of 1944-45 burned it out, and the communists rebuilt it as a museum complex with a plain modern interior. Since the late 2010s a government program has been rebuilding the old wings as they looked around 1900, and you can visit the results: St. Stephen's Hall, the Riding Hall and the Main Guardhouse. In September 2026 the new government stopped work on another wing, so expect scaffolding and hoardings for a while. On the way, the President's office in the Sándor Palace has a changing of the guard, and the Hospital in the Rock, a wartime hospital and Cold War bunker under the hill, runs guided tours if you have time.

The Hungarian National Gallery fills most of the palace. Go for the 19th-century rooms, where Mihály Munkácsy and Pál Szinyei Merse show what Hungary looked like, and for the huge, strange landscapes of Tivadar Csontváry. The terrace in front, with the Turul bird on its gate, has the classic view down the Danube to the Chain Bridge.

Walk down the south end of Castle Hill, past the Várkert Bazár, the restored 19th-century arcades at the foot of the palace, into the Tabán, a park where a crowded old quarter of Serbs, Greeks and craftsmen, later a bohemian one, stood until it was pulled down in the 1930s. Have lunch in one of the old restaurants on its edge: a gulyás, the paprika beef soup, and a túrós csusza, pasta with cottage cheese, sour cream and crispy bacon.

Ten minutes on, at the Buda end of Elisabeth Bridge, is Rudas. The heart of it is an octagonal pool under a dome built by the Ottoman pasha Sokollu Mustafa in the 1570s, with light falling through small colored glass holes in the roof, and it's the best surviving piece of Ottoman Budapest. On top of the modern wing is a rooftop pool with the Danube right below.

With Gellért Bath closed for renovation since October 2025 and Király shut since 2020, this is the place for the old Turkish experience. Go from hot to cold pool and back, and don't rush.

Walk south along the river to the Cave Church (Sziklatemplom), a chapel cut into the rock of the hill in the 1920s by monks of the Pauline order, the only monastic order founded in Hungary. The communists walled it up in 1951 and arrested the monks; it reopened in 1989, and a piece of the wall is kept by the entrance. From there a path zigzags up Gellért Hill, about 30 minutes of steady climbing. It's named after a Venetian bishop who, as the story goes, was thrown down it by pagans in 1046; later versions put him in a spiked barrel. The Habsburgs built the Citadella on top after 1848 to keep cannons pointed at the city that had just rebelled against them, and the Liberty Statue, a woman holding up a palm leaf, went up in 1947 as a monument to the Soviet "liberation". After 1989 the city moved the Soviet soldier at her feet to Memento Park and rewrote the inscription to honor everyone who died for Hungary's freedom.

After years of works the Citadella reopened in spring 2026, with a free park on top and a paid exhibition in the walls. Come for the sunset either way. Every bridge and both banks of the river are below you, and when the lights come on the Parliament, the palace and the Chain Bridge light up one after another.

The Hungarian Parliament was built in 1885-1904 for a country that had just got its own government back inside the Habsburg empire, and it was made to look the part: 268 meters along the river, 691 rooms and a dome 96 meters high, a number chosen for the year 896, when the Magyars are said to have arrived. The architect, Imre Steindl, went blind before it was finished and died weeks before it was handed over in 1902.

The guided tour takes you up the main staircase, through the old upper house chamber and under the dome, where the Holy Crown of Hungary is kept under guard. The crown, with its famous bent cross, was taken west in 1945, handed to the US Army, kept at Fort Knox for much of the Cold War and returned only in January 1978.

Walk five minutes south along the river from the Parliament to the Shoes on the Danube Bank, sixty pairs of iron shoes on the embankment. In the winter of 1944-45, militiamen of the Arrow Cross, the Hungarian Nazi party then in power, brought Jews here, made them take their shoes off, and shot them into the river. Around 20,000 Jews, and others the regime hated, were murdered at the river that winter. The memorial went up in 2005. People leave candles and stones in the shoes. Stand there for a few minutes before you walk on.

Two blocks inland is Liberty Square, the best place in the city to watch Hungary argue with its past. At one end is a Soviet war memorial, one of the last left in Budapest. At the other is the 2014 monument to the German occupation, an eagle swooping on the Archangel Gabriel, which shows Hungary only as a victim of 1944. Historians objected that Hungarian authorities, working with Eichmann's SS, deported some 437,000 Jews that year, and citizens answered with their own memorial in front of it: photos, letters and personal objects, still there. In between, Ronald Reagan strolls on a bronze plinth, near the US Embassy.

On the way, cross Széchenyi tér at the Pest end of the Chain Bridge, the first permanent bridge over the Danube here, built in 1849 on the initiative of Count István Széchenyi, the reformer Hungarians call "the greatest Hungarian", who also founded the Academy of Sciences that stands on the square. St. Stephen's Basilica, ten minutes inland, took 54 years to build, partly because the first dome fell in in 1868. It's 96 meters high, the same as the Parliament dome, on purpose. In a side chapel is the Holy Right, the mummified right hand of St. Stephen, the first king of Hungary, carried through the streets every 20 August. In the crypt lies Ferenc Puskás, the greatest Hungarian footballer.

Take the lift and the last stairs up to the dome terrace. It's the best view on the Pest side, and the only one at this height in the middle of the city.

For lunch, eat like a Budapest office worker at an étkezde, a small canteen with a handwritten menu and shared tables, open for lunch. Start with gulyás, which in Hungary is a soup of beef, paprika and potato, and follow with pörkölt, the stew the rest of the world calls goulash, or a főzelék, a thick vegetable stew topped with a fried egg or a meatball.

Kádár Étkezde on Klauzál tér, a legend since the 1950s, reopened in 2025 after five years closed and is now a little smarter and pricier, open in the daytime only; Frici Papa on Király utca is the cheap, cheerful one. They're both on the way to the next stop.

The Dohány Street Synagogue is the largest in Europe, built in 1854-59 in a Moorish style with twin towers that look more like Istanbul than Vienna. Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, was born next door. Behind it is the story of 1944 (the Holocaust Memorial Center on Páva utca tells the whole of it): the area became a walled ghetto that winter, more than 2,000 people who died there are buried in the courtyard, and the Raoul Wallenberg memorial garden holds a metal weeping willow with the names of the dead on its leaves.

From there, walk the old Jewish Quarter: the restored Rumbach Street Synagogue, the Orthodox one on Kazinczy utca, Gozsdu udvar's chain of courtyards, and the big murals on the bare firewalls left by demolished buildings.

The ruin bar was born here in the early 2000s, when young people took over empty, half-collapsed tenement houses in the 7th district, filled them with junk furniture and opened a bar. Szimpla Kert, opened in its current building in 2004, is the original and still the strangest: a maze of rooms and a courtyard full of old bathtubs, car parts and plants. It's now on every tourist list, so come early in the evening to see it, then move on.

Instant-Fogas is a big complex of rooms and dance floors for later, and Mazel Tov is a calmer, plant-filled courtyard with good food. Have dinner first: the 7th district is full of good, cheap places to eat.

Around 1900 Budapest had hundreds of coffee houses, and writers practically lived in them. The New York Café on the Grand Boulevard, opened in 1894, is the most over-the-top: gilded columns, frescoes and chandeliers, often called the most beautiful café in the world. It's now a tourist sight with a queue and prices to match, so go right at opening for breakfast and a slice of Dobos torta, the caramel-topped layer cake invented in Budapest in 1884.

If you'd rather skip the queue, the Centrál near Ferenciek tere, a café of writers and professors since 1887, is grand without the crowds.

Walk over to Andrássy Avenue, the city's grand boulevard of the 1870s and 80s and a UNESCO site, and the Hungarian State Opera by Miklós Ybl, opened in 1884 and reopened in 2022 after a long restoration. The story goes that Franz Joseph allowed it on the condition that it was smaller than the opera in Vienna, and that he was annoyed at how much more beautiful it turned out. Gustav Mahler ran it from 1888 to 1891.

Guided tours of the staircase, the royal box and the gilded horseshoe auditorium run only in the afternoon, at 1:30, 3 and 4:30 in English, for about 31 EUR, which doesn't fit this morning. Better: come back for a performance on one of your nights here, which shows you the same hall for less.

Take the M1 from the Opera station. It opened in 1896, the first underground line on the European continent, with small yellow carriages, tiled stations just under the street and wooden ticket booths. Get off at Hősök tere, Heroes' Square, after the House of Terror at Andrássy 60, the former headquarters of the Arrow Cross and then of the communist secret police. The museum there has been closed since September 2026 while the new government reviews its exhibition.

Heroes' Square was built for the 1896 Millennium, the thousandth anniversary of the Magyar conquest: Árpád and the seven chieftains around a column meant to carry the Archangel Gabriel, and kings and heroes in the colonnades behind. The Gabriel statue was taken down for restoration in 2024 and is due back by the end of 2026. On 16 June 1989 a quarter of a million people gathered here for the reburial of Imre Nagy, the prime minister executed after 1956, a turning point on the way out of communism.

On the left side of the square is the Museum of Fine Arts, one of the best old-master collections in Central Europe: El Greco, Goya, Raphael, Bruegel, and a strong Egyptian collection downstairs. Don't miss the Romanesque Hall, a fake medieval church interior from 1906 restored in 2018.

Afterwards walk into City Park. Vajdahunyad Castle on the lake was built for the 1896 celebrations as a collage of famous Hungarian buildings, Transylvania's Corvin Castle among them, and the House of Music by Sou Fujimoto, opened in 2022, sits under a roof full of holes for the trees to grow through.

Széchenyi is the bath on every poster: a huge yellow neo-baroque palace from 1913, three outdoor pools steaming even in the snow, and old men playing chess on floating boards in the hot one. The water comes up from more than a kilometer down at around 75°C. It's touristy and still a pleasure, especially in the late afternoon, when the light goes and the steam rises.

Inside are 15 more thermal pools and saunas. Parts of the building are being renovated in phases, and in late 2026 some changing rooms and one of the thermal sections are closed.

Take the M1 back and end the day with music. The Liszt Academy on Liszt Ferenc tér, Franz Liszt's music school, has an Art Nouveau concert hall from 1907, all gold leaf, green Zsolnay ceramics and carved wood, and one of the best acoustics in Europe. Bartók and Kodály taught here. Check the program for an evening concert.

If the opera has a performance tonight, that's the other choice. Either way, have dinner on Liszt Ferenc tér, a square of restaurant terraces that's busy until late.

Szentendre was rebuilt by Serbs. After the Great Migration of 1690, when Patriarch Arsenije III led thousands of Serbs north away from the Ottomans, many settled here, and for a century it was a Serbian merchant town with seven Orthodox churches. Most of the Serbs later left, and two of the churches passed to other faiths, but the rest stayed: the Blagoveštenska church on the main square, and above it Belgrade Cathedral, the seat of the Serbian Orthodox diocese of Buda, with a museum of Serbian church art next door.

In the 20th century painters moved in and it became an artists' colony, so between the churches you'll find galleries, the Margit Kovács ceramics museum and a lot of souvenir shops. Walk up the lanes to the Catholic church on the hill for the view over the red roofs to the river.

Szentendre has an odd sweet tooth: a marzipan museum with a life-size marzipan Michael Jackson, and a lot of shops selling it by the slab. Try some, then have lunch by the river. This is a good place for halászlé, the fiery red fisherman's soup made with Danube carp, or for lecsó, peppers and tomatoes stewed with paprika and sausage.

Visegrád was the royal seat of Hungary in the 14th century. In 1335 the kings of Hungary, Bohemia and Poland met here and agreed to trade around Vienna, which is why the Visegrád Group of today takes its name from this village. King Matthias Corvinus turned the palace down by the river into one of the first Renaissance palaces north of the Alps. It was buried and forgotten until archaeologists found it in 1934; part of it is rebuilt and can be visited.

The real reason to come is the upper citadel, high on the hill. From its walls you see the Danube make its great bend, with the hills of the Börzsöny on the far bank. It's a steep 40-minute walk up, or take a taxi from the village and walk down.

Come down to the riverbank in Visegrád as the light goes, with the citadel above you and Nagymaros across the water. Then cross on the small ferry to Nagymaros, hourly until about 7:45pm, and take a train back to Budapest from the station by the landing (about 45-55 minutes to Nyugati). Or take the bus back, past Szentendre and the river in the dusk. Check for engineering works on the Nagymaros line before you go.

Start at the Hungarian National Museum on Múzeum körút, the place to understand everything you've seen: from the Avars and the Magyar conquest to the Ottomans, the Habsburgs and the 20th century, including the Treaty of Trianon of 1920, which took two-thirds of the kingdom's territory and still shapes Hungarian politics and memorials. Its steps are where the revolution of 15 March 1848 is remembered, the day young radicals led by the poet Sándor Petőfi printed their demands and marched through Pest. The famous scene of Petőfi reciting his National Song on these steps is probably a later legend, but the date is a national holiday, and Hungarians wear a red, white and green cockade.

Fifteen minutes southeast, past the old Radio building on Bródy Sándor utca, in the courtyard of the round Corvin cinema, stands the statue of a teenage boy with a rifle. On 23 October 1956 a student march turned into a revolution when the secret police shot at the crowd outside that Radio building. Here in Corvin köz the Pesti srácok, "the lads of Pest", many of them teenagers, held off Soviet tanks with petrol bombs. On 4 November the Soviets came back with a full invasion; some 2,500 Hungarians died, 200,000 fled the country, and Imre Nagy was hanged in 1958.

Look at the buildings on the Grand Boulevard around you: some still have bullet holes from those days. 23 October is a national holiday, and in 2026 it marks seventy years, with big commemorations around Kossuth tér and the Parliament.

Walk west along Ráday utca, a street of restaurants where you can have lunch, to the Great Market Hall, opened in 1897 at the Pest end of Liberty Bridge, is the largest and most beautiful in the city, with a roof of colored Zsolnay tiles outside and an iron hall inside. The ground floor is a real market: paprika in every strength, salami, tokaji wine, goose liver and vegetables. Downstairs are pickles and fish.

Skip the food counters upstairs, which are aimed squarely at tourists. Buy paprika and a Pick salami to take home here.

Outside the Market Hall, at Fővám tér, get on tram 2, which runs along the Pest embankment for its whole route: under Liberty Bridge and Elisabeth Bridge, past the Vigadó concert hall, the Chain Bridge, the Shoes on the Danube Bank and the Parliament, with Buda Castle across the water the whole way. It's often called one of the most beautiful tram lines in Europe, and it costs one ticket. Sit on the left. Get off at Jászai Mari tér, where the statue of Imre Nagy now stands, moved here in 2019 from its old place by the Parliament.

From Jászai Mari tér walk onto Margaret Bridge and down onto Margaret Island, 2.5 km of park in the middle of the Danube, closed to most cars. It's named after the 13th-century princess Margaret, daughter of King Béla IV, who lived and died as a nun in the Dominican convent whose ruins you'll pass. This is where Budapest comes to run, picnic and lie on the grass.

Walk the length of it past the musical fountain (with shows in season), the old water tower, the Japanese garden and the Hajós Alfréd pool, home of Hungarian water polo, a sport in which Hungary has won more Olympic golds than any other nation. Or rent a bike or one of the four-wheeled pedal carts at the entrance.

For the last night, have a proper Hungarian dinner: paprikás csirke, chicken paprikash with sour cream and nokedli dumplings, or töltött káposzta, stuffed cabbage, with a bottle of Hungarian wine. Újlipótváros, the 1930s neighborhood just off the island, has old-style restaurants where locals still eat, and the 7th district is full of them too.

Then walk along the river once more, or take an evening cruise from the Pest embankment. The point is to see the Parliament, the palace and the bridges lit up from the water.