Budapest travel guide

Top 10 sights in Budapest

Ranked by Wikipedia language editions — proven fame.

1. 

   1© Andrew Bossi · CC BY-SA 2.5

   Pest

   The flat eastern bank, which was a separate city until the union of 1873 and is now where most of Budapest lives and works. Its grand boulevards, the parliament and the Jewish quarter are all on this side; the hills and the castle are across the river.

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2. 

   2© Jakub Hałun · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Buda Castle

   The royal palace of Hungary, first built in the thirteenth century, blown apart when the Habsburgs took the city from the Ottomans in 1686, rebuilt, and destroyed again in the siege of 1945. What stands is a post-war reconstruction holding two museums.

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3. 

   3© User:Sveter (Please credit as "Petr Šmerkl, Wikipedia" in case you use this outs · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Heroes' Square

   The square at the end of Andrassy Avenue, built for the millennium of the Magyar conquest in 1896 around a colonnade of Hungarian kings behind the seven chieftains on horseback. The Museum of Fine Arts and the Palace of Art face each other across it; Imre Nagy was reburied here in 1989.

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4. 

   4© Civertan · CC BY 3.0

   Aquincum

   The Roman legionary town and provincial capital in what is now Óbuda, with an amphitheatre for some twelve thousand. Its museum keeps a water organ of AD 228, found in pieces and rebuilt, which can be heard played.

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   5

   St. Stephen's Basilica

   The largest church in Budapest, begun in 1851 and finished in 1905 after its dome collapsed in a storm. It is ninety-six metres high — exactly the height of the parliament dome, since city law forbids anything taller — and it holds the mummified right hand of St Stephen.

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   6

   Óbuda

   The oldest of the three towns that became Budapest, built over the Roman city and keeping a small baroque square in the middle of socialist housing blocks. The Kiscelli museum and the Roman ruins are the reason to come this far north.

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7. 

   7© Stefan Schäfer, Lich · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Matthias Church

   The coronation church of Buda, medieval in origin and rebuilt in the 1890s with a roof of diamond-patterned Zsolnay tiles. The Ottomans used it as a mosque for a century and a half, and the last two Habsburg kings of Hungary were crowned in it.

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8. 

   8© Marc Ryckaert (MJJR) · CC BY 3.0

   Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest

   The museum on Heroes' Square, opened in 1906, whose Spanish collection is the largest outside Spain — the Esterházy princes bought well — with Raphael's Esterházy Madonna and a strong Dutch holding beside it.

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9. 

   9© The original uploader was OsvátA at Hungarian Wikipedia. · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Dohány Street Synagogue

   Built in 1859 in Moorish revival, seating three thousand and the largest synagogue in Europe. Its courtyard is a cemetery, which Jewish law does not normally allow: two thousand people who died in the ghetto in the winter of 1944 are buried there because there was nowhere else.

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    10

    Hungarian National Museum

    Founded in 1802 out of a private donation, and the place where the 1848 revolution began — Petőfi is said to have read his poem on its steps. It holds the coronation mantle of the Hungarian kings, embroidered in the eleventh century.

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1. 

   1© Felix König · CC BY 3.0

   Vajdahunyad Castle

   A castle built for the millennial exhibition of 1896 as a composite of twenty-one real Hungarian buildings, from Romanesque to baroque, jammed into one silhouette. It was so popular in temporary materials that it was rebuilt permanently in stone.

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2. 

   2© Derzsi Elekes Andor · CC BY-SA 3.0

   House of Terror Museum

   The building at 60 Andrássy Avenue that served as headquarters first to the Hungarian fascists and then to the communist secret police, both of which used the cellars for interrogation. It opened as a museum in 2002 and its politics are contested, but the cells are the cells.

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3. 

   3© Fred Romero from Paris, France · CC BY 2.0

   Great Market Hall

   The largest indoor market in Budapest, opened in 1897 under an iron roof tiled by Zsolnay. Produce is on the ground floor and the upstairs is now largely langos and paprika for visitors, but the butchers and the pickle stalls are still doing real trade.

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4. 

   4© w:en:User:Zello · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Budapest Ghetto

   The site of the Jewish ghetto established in Budapest at the end of the Second World War. Markers and memorials around the Dohány Street synagogue record the darkest period of the city.

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5. 

   5© Elekes Andor · CC BY 4.0

   Citadella

   The fortress the Habsburgs built on Gellert Hill in 1854 to hold Budapest down after the failed revolution, with its guns trained on the city rather than away from it. The Liberty Statue of 1947 stands beside it; the Soviet soldier at its foot was removed in 1992.

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6. 

   6© Civertan · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Szabadság tér

   Liberty Square, laid out where the Neugebäude barracks stood — the building in which the first Hungarian prime minister was executed in 1849. A Soviet war memorial still stands on it, and a bronze Reagan walks towards it, which is roughly the argument Hungary is having with itself.

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7. 

   7© Dezidor · CC BY 3.0

   City Park

   Park in Budapest laid out from 1813, among the first public parks in the world. It holds the Széchenyi baths, the zoo and Vajdahunyad Castle, built for the 1896 millennium fair.

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8. 

   8© Ferran Cornellà · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Memento Park

   A field outside the city where forty-odd statues from the communist decades were moved in 1993 rather than smashed — Lenin, Marx, liberating Soviet soldiers, all standing about in the grass. The decision not to destroy them is the exhibit.

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9. 

   9© michael clarke stuff · CC BY-SA 2.0

   Gresham Palace

   An art nouveau block of 1906 built for an English insurance company at the Pest end of the Chain Bridge, with Zsolnay tiles, a wrought-iron peacock gate and a glazed arcade through the middle. It stood derelict for decades and has been a hotel since 2004.

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    Hungarian National Gallery

    The national art collection, established in 1957 and housed in Buda Castle — Hungarian painting and sculpture from Gothic altarpieces to Munkácsy's vast canvases and the Nagybánya painters. A move to a purpose-built gallery has been argued over for years.

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