🇭🇺 Europe
Budapest, the 'pearl of the Danube', with its thermal baths, its monumental parliament and a nightlife scene that never lets up.
Hungary is an odd country in the best sense: it sits in the middle of Europe but its language resembles none of its neighbours' — it is not Slavic, Germanic or Latin — its cooking has more in common with the East than with Vienna, and its capital is built over some hundred and twenty thermal springs that come up out of the ground on their own. That last point is not a piece of trivia: soaking in hot water is an everyday activity here, not a spa outing.
Budapest holds almost all of the appeal and is one of the most striking capitals in Europe: it is really two cities that merged in 1873, Buda with its hills and its castle, and Pest with the monumental parliament and the boulevards. The Danube runs between them, crossed by seven bridges, and at night the whole thing is lit up. It is cheaper than Vienna or Prague, it has a nightlife scene famous for its ruin bars — bars set up inside abandoned buildings in the old Jewish quarter — and you can walk all of it.
Outside the capital there is a good deal more than usually gets talked about: the Tokaj wine region, which has been making sweet wines for centuries and was the first demarcated wine area in the world; Lake Balaton, which works as the sea of a landlocked country; and the puszta, the plain of the Great Hungarian Plain with its tradition of horsemen. For anyone who wants to stay longer, Hungary also has a working holiday agreement with Argentina.
The local currency is the forint (HUF). Carry some cash, tell your bank before you travel and check the day's exchange rate.
Full converter for HUF →Budapest (BUD) is effectively the country's only way in by air. Bus 100E runs straight from the airport to the centre, to Deák Ferenc, and needs a special ticket that is not the ordinary city one. MÁV trains link Budapest with Vienna in about two and a half hours and with Bratislava in a little over two, which makes combining the three capitals very easy; towards Prague and Kraków the journey is long and the night train or a flight makes more sense. Inside Budapest, metro line M1, dating from 1896, is the oldest in continental Europe and a World Heritage Site. In summer, boats on the Danube run up to Szentendre and Visegrád.
May, June and September are the best months: pleasant weather, terraces open and none of the heavy heat of July and August, which you feel in Budapest because it is a city of stone with little greenery in the centre. September adds the harvest in Tokaj and in Eger. Summer is Balaton season, when the lake comes alive, and also the season of the Sziget festival, one of the biggest in Europe, which fills the city in mid-August and sends accommodation prices up.
Winter has an argument of its own and a strong one: open-air thermal baths with snow around them and steam coming off the water are one of the best things you can do in Europe in January, and on top of that it is low season with low prices. December adds the Christmas markets on Vörösmarty Square and at the basilica, which are among the best on the continent. You have to accept real cold, with temperatures below zero, and short days.
Hungarian cooking turns on paprika, which arrived from the Americas and became a national identity here: there is sweet, hot and smoked, and nothing else stands in for it. Gulyás is not what gets served as goulash in the rest of the world: in Hungary it is a soup of meat, potato and paprika, and the thick stew is called pörkölt. There is also lángos, fried dough covered in sour cream and grated cheese, the national street food, halászlé or Danube fish soup, and chicken paprikash with sour cream.
To drink, Hungarian wine is well above its reputation: sweet Tokaji, red Egri Bikavér and the whites of the Balaton. Pálinka is the national fruit brandy, strong and with protected designation, and Unicum is a bitter herbal liqueur that is an acquired taste. Two useful customs: people do not clink beer glasses when toasting — a tradition that goes back to 1849, when the Austrians toasted that way after executing the Hungarian generals — and a tip of around ten per cent is stated when you pay rather than left on the table.
Hungary is a safe country and you can walk Budapest at night without trouble. The risks are petty: pickpockets on public transport and in the busiest areas, and above all two classic Budapest nightlife scams. The first is bars with inflated bills, where the real price only shows up at the end; the second, women who approach tourists in the street and invite them to a particular venue, where an impossible bill then arrives. The rule is simple: pick where you go in yourself and ask prices before you order. Emergencies: 112.
The health system is decent and travel insurance is compulsory for the Schengen visa, with minimum cover of thirty thousand euros. Tap water is drinkable everywhere in the country. There are no particular health risks. Two things specific to this destination: in the thermal baths, do not spend too long in the hottest pools — there are signs with the temperature and the recommended time — and do not combine them with alcohol, which is how most incidents happen; and in summer, the sun over the Balaton is deceptive because there is always a breeze.
Hungary is one of the cheapest destinations in the European Union and noticeably more affordable than Austria or Germany, in the same range as Czechia or Poland. As a rough guide, and not as official data because none exists for these items, a dorm bed usually runs from fifteen to thirty euros, a mid-range hotel from sixty to a hundred and ten, a dish in a local restaurant from eight to fifteen euros and a beer between two and three. Thermal bath entry is the recurring expense of the trip and varies quite a bit depending on the day and whether you take a private cabin.
As in Prague, the most common trap is currency exchange: Hungary does not use the euro but the forint, and the exchange offices in the centre and at the airports apply very poor rates. Pay by card, which is accepted almost everywhere, and if you need cash take it out of a bank ATM, refusing the conversion the machine itself offers. Other ways to save: the set lunch menu in restaurants, the 24 and 72 hour transport passes, and getting out of the tourist ring in central Pest, where prices drop a lot within a few blocks.
Hungarian is one of the hardest languages in Europe and resembles nothing around it: its closest relatives are Finnish and Estonian, and even those are very distant. Surnames come before first names, the other way round from Spanish. Hungarians are friendly but more reserved and formal than Latin Americans on first contact; you greet people when you walk into a shop and you turn up on time. There is a certain ironic pessimism in the humour that they themselves recognise as a national trait.
Two historical points worth keeping in mind in conversation. One is the Treaty of Trianon of 1920, under which Hungary lost two thirds of its territory and millions of Hungarians were left outside its borders: it is a very sensitive subject that still comes up in politics. The other is the 1956 revolution against Soviet rule, crushed by tanks, which is central to the country's memory. And in the thermal baths, etiquette matters: shower before going in, wear flip-flops and respect the sections where a swimming cap is required.
The history of Hungary begins with an anomaly that still catches people off guard: in the heart of Europe, ringed for centuries by Slavs, Germans and Latins, lives a people whose language is not Indo-European. Hungarian — or Magyar — belongs to the Finno-Ugric family, distantly related to Finnish and Estonian and, more closely, to languages spoken by hunters in the forests of the Urals and western Siberia. Their ancestors, the seven Magyar clans led by Árpád, crossed the Carpathians around 895-896 and settled in the Pannonian plain, the old Roman province that Huns and Avars had trodden before them. Out of that nomadic ride there grew, in barely a century, a Christian European kingdom: in the year 1000 Stephen I received the crown and founded a state that, with shifting borders, has lasted more than a thousand years.
What followed was a run of splendours and catastrophes that left deep marks. The Mongol invasion of 1241 flattened the country; the Renaissance of Matthias Corvinus put it on a level with Italy; the disaster at Mohács (1526) split it in three and handed it to the Ottomans for 150 years; the Habsburgs folded it into their empire and triggered rebellions that run all the way to the revolution of 1848 and the Compromise of 1867. The twentieth century was brutal: the Treaty of Trianon (1920) took away two thirds of the territory and left millions of Hungarians outside the borders — the central wound of the national identity; the alliance with the Axis ended in the Hungarian Holocaust, the deportation of more than 430,000 Jews to Auschwitz in barely two months of 1944, and in the siege of Budapest. Then came Stalinism, the 1956 revolution crushed by Soviet tanks, the long compromise of Kádár's "goulash communism" and, in 1989, the Pan-European Picnic at Sopron, where the Iron Curtain was opened for the first time. Travelling through Hungary — from Budapest and the Danube Bend to the vineyards of Tokaj, from the Balaton to Roman and Ottoman Pécs — is reading that layered history in every stone.
Read the full history of Hungary →Pick a region and open each destination to see what to do, prices and how to get there.
These are the sources we cite most across this country's guides, with how many times each appears. Hard data —tickets, opening hours, requirements, transport— comes from the official source and carries the date we checked it. Restaurant and hotel picks come from guides and reviews, and we say so on each page.
