🇭🇺 Hungary · North and east
There is a place in Hungary where the land seems to have no end: the Hortobágy puszta, the great grassy steppe of the east of the country, an endless plain of pasture, huge sky and horizons that fade into the distance. It is the landscape most characteristic of the Hungarian soul, sung by poets and painted by artists, and the heart of Hortobágy National Park, the country's oldest (1973) and a Unesco World Heritage cultural landscape since 1999. Here, for centuries, mounted herders looked after free-ranging flocks, and that living pastoral culture is precisely what Unesco protects.
Hortobágy is the land of the csikós, the legendary horsemen of the puszta, who in their wide shirts and blue trousers put on astonishing riding displays, such as the famous 'Puszta five' — a rider standing on two horses driving five at full gallop. It is also home to the native breeds that give the place its identity: the enormous long-horned grey oxen, the racka sheep with their spiral horns, the nonius horses, the buffalo and the mangalica pigs. And above all, it is a paradise for birdwatching: in autumn, the crane migration, with tens of thousands of them filling the sky at dusk, is one of the great natural spectacles in Europe.
The park's symbol is the Nine-Arched Bridge, the longest stone bridge in Hungary, which crosses the river Hortobágy next to the historic coaching inn. This guide tells you what to see and do on the puszta: the horsemen's displays, the cart rides, the animal breeds, crane watching, the village museums and how to get there by train from Debrecen. A journey into the great silence of the Hungarian plain and into a way of life that refuses to disappear.
Contrary to appearances, the Hortobágy puszta is not a pristine natural steppe but a landscape shaped by people. In the Middle Ages there were villages and woods here, but the wars, the depopulation of the Ottoman period and, above all, the regulation of the river Tisza from the middle of the nineteenth century transformed the region: by channelling and containing the river, its old floodplains dried out and the soil turned saline (alkaline), giving rise to the immense salt grasslands we see today. On that land, extensive herding prospered for centuries, with its shepherds and its native breeds, which kept the steppe's biodiversity alive. The twentieth century also left a dark and serious page: between 1950 and 1953, the Stalinist regime of Mátyás Rákosi set up a network of internment and forced labour camps on the puszta, where around ten thousand people considered 'class enemies' were deported without trial. In 1973 Hortobágy became Hungary's first national park, and in 1999 Unesco declared it a World Heritage cultural landscape. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The northern Highlands and the eastern Great Plain: the fortress of Eger and its heroic siege of 1552, the vineyards of Tokaj and their wine of kings, Debrecen, the "Calvinist Rome" where Kossuth declared independence in 1849, and the endless puszta of Hortobágy.
Read the history of North and east →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Anyone arriving at the Hortobágy puszta for the first time has the sense of standing before an eternal landscape: an endless plain of yellow grass, an enormous sky, the odd sweep well cut against the horizon and, far off, a herd of grey oxen. It looks like the pristine steppe it has always been, a wild grassland untouched since the beginning of time. But that impression is, to a large extent, a beautiful deception: the Hortobágy puszta is not a natural steppe but a landscape shaped by human hands over the centuries. Understanding that is the key to its history.
Hortobágy stretches across the heart of the Hungarian Great Plain (the Alföld), west of Debrecen. In antiquity and the Middle Ages, the area was not a bare plain: there were woods, marshes, villages and fields, watered by the floods of the river Tisza and its branches. The region has been inhabited since prehistoric times, and in the Middle Ages there were dozens of villages with their churches. It was a run of historical catastrophes and one great feat of engineering that erased that world and gave rise to the open landscape we admire today and that Unesco protects as world heritage.
The first blow came in the late Middle Ages and, above all, with the long Ottoman occupation of Hungary (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries). Wars, raids and insecurity emptied much of the plain: many Hortobágy villages were abandoned and disappeared, and their land was turned into common pasture. The nearby, prosperous city of Debrecen gradually acquired these enormous tracts and devoted them to extensive livestock rearing. So the herding of large free-ranging flocks — oxen, horses, sheep — became the dominant activity, and with it the figure of the puszta herder was born.
The second, decisive blow was a human work of the nineteenth century: the regulation of the river Tisza. From the middle of that century, in order to win farmland and prevent flooding, a colossal canalisation of the Tisza and its tributaries was undertaken, with dykes and meander cuts. The result completely transformed the Hortobágy region: with the river contained, its old floodplains stopped receiving water, the water table dropped and the soil turned saline, becoming alkaline (what in Hungarian is called szik). On those saline soils only hardy grasses thrive, not trees or crops, and so the immense grassy steppe that characterises Hortobágy today took shape. The puszta, paradoxically, is the child of both abandonment and modern engineering: a 'natural' landscape created by history.
On that saline steppe a unique pastoral culture flourished for centuries, the one that gives Hortobágy its soul and that Unesco recognised when it declared it a World Heritage 'cultural landscape' in 1999: an exceptional example of a territory shaped by a pastoral society that, raising its livestock in the open, managed to preserve the biodiversity of these grasslands for thousands of years.
The protagonists were the herders, organised by speciality: the csikós looked after the horses, the gulyás the oxen, the juhász the sheep and the kondás the pigs. They lived for months out in the open, with their felt cloaks (szűr), their shelters, their dogs and their whips, in a hard and free existence that Hungarian literature and painting turned into a romantic symbol of the nation. Out of that tradition came equestrian feats such as the famous 'Puszta five', and also the survival of the native breeds that are today a living treasure of the park: the long-horned Hungarian grey ox, driven on the hoof for centuries to the markets of Vienna, Nuremberg and Venice; the racka sheep with its spiral horns; the nonius horses; the water buffalo and the woolly mangalica pig. Traditional herding did not only feed the region: it kept the steppe open and alive, stopping scrub from taking over and preserving its extraordinary wealth of birds and plants.
The vastness of Hortobágy, which for centuries had been a byword for freedom and open horizons, became in the middle of the twentieth century the setting for one of the darkest chapters in recent Hungarian history. After the Stalinist communist regime of Mátyás Rákosi was installed, the puszta was turned into a place of punishment and confinement.
Between 1950 and 1953, the regime set up a network of twelve internment and forced labour camps at Hortobágy and in neighbouring districts (Nagykunság, Hajdúság). The deportations began on 23 June 1950. Around ten thousand people considered 'class enemies' were taken there without trial or judicial sentence: families from the border areas of the west and south of the country — regarded as 'unreliable' in the middle of the Cold War — former landowners, well-off peasants labelled 'kulaks', people of 'undesirable' social origin, including the elderly, the sick and children. They had barely an hour to gather their things before being loaded onto wagons and moved out to the steppe. In the camps, watched by armed guards, they lived crammed into stables and barracks and worked up to twelve hours a day in inhuman conditions on the state farms. Many, especially the weakest, died. The camps were closed in the autumn of 1953, after the amnesty decreed by Imre Nagy's first government, but the deportees were not allowed to return immediately to their confiscated homes, and they were marked for years. It is a real and serious page of history remembered today with monuments and plaques, so that the beauty of the puszta does not erase the memory of those who suffered on it.
The second half of the twentieth century also brought recognition of Hortobágy's immense natural and cultural value. As ecological awareness grew, it became clear that this landscape of saline grassland, marsh and wetland held an exceptional biodiversity, especially of birds, and that the pastoral culture that had created it deserved protection. In 1973, Hortobágy became Hungary's first national park, with tens of thousands of hectares protected.
The park today preserves both the nature and the human legacy: the herds of native breeds still graze the steppe, the csikós keep their equestrian traditions alive at the Máta stud farm, and the great fish ponds and lagoons — also protected under the Ramsar Convention on wetlands of international importance — host hundreds of bird species. Every autumn, tens of thousands of cranes stop over at Hortobágy on their migration, in one of the most impressive natural spectacles in Europe. In 1999, Unesco inscribed 'Hortobágy National Park – the Puszta' on the World Heritage list as a cultural landscape, stressing that it is an outstanding example of thousands of years of coexistence between people and the steppe.
Today Hortobágy is at once a first-rank nature reserve, an open-air museum of pastoral life and a destination that welcomes travellers from all over the world. Beside the Nine-Arched Bridge — the longest stone bridge in Hungary, built between 1827 and 1833 — and the old coaching inn, you can cross the steppe by cart, watch the horsemen, observe the cranes at dusk and feel the immense silence of the plain. A landscape that looks eternal and that nonetheless holds, among its grasses, the whole history of Hungary: the history of work, of freedom and of pain as well.