Hungary Discovery Guide

Hungary offers more than most countries its size: a capital that ranks among the handsomest in Europe, a thermal bathing culture inherited from Romans and Ottomans and still used daily, and a wine tradition that was supplying European courts before Bordeaux was classified.

Budapest is the reason most people come, and it earns it — the Danube frontage with the parliament and the castle hill is a UNESCO World Heritage site, and the city sits on more than a hundred thermal springs, which is why there are grand public baths in the middle of a park.

Beyond the capital, Lake Balaton is central Europe’s largest lake and the country’s summer coast; the Tokaj hills make one of the world’s great sweet wines; and Pecs, Eger and Szentendre are small cities worth a night each. Prices are noticeably lower than in western Europe, and everything is within three hours of Budapest.

If you have three days

All of them in Budapest: the castle district and Fisherman’s Bastion, the parliament interior if you book ahead, the Great Market Hall, a thermal bath at Szechenyi or Gellert, and an evening walking the river between the bridges.

If you want the baths properly

Szechenyi for the outdoor pools in a park, Gellert for the art nouveau interior, Rudas for the Ottoman octagonal pool under a dome, and Kiraly for the oldest and plainest. Go on a weekday morning.

If you want wine

Tokaj, two hours north-east, for the botrytised sweet wines and a UNESCO-listed landscape of cellars cut into volcanic rock. Eger, closer, for reds and the Valley of the Beautiful Women, a horseshoe of cellar doors where you taste from the barrel.

If you have a week

Add two nights at Lake Balaton — Tihany on the peninsula, Badacsony for the volcanic hills and wine — and a night in Pecs in the south, which has Ottoman buildings, early Christian tombs and the best small-city museums in Hungary.

Hungarians are a linguistic island in central Europe, and a good deal of the national character is built around that fact and around a history of coming out on the losing side.

The language as identity

Hungarian belongs to the Uralic family, distantly related to Finnish and Estonian and to nothing else nearby. Hungarians will tell you this within about ten minutes, and the pride in it is genuine — the nineteenth-century national revival was a language movement before it was anything else.

Trianon

The 1920 treaty that removed two thirds of the kingdom’s territory is still a live subject, marked by a national day of remembrance and visible in maps sold in souvenir shops. Around two million ethnic Hungarians live in neighbouring countries as a result.

Bathing as a civic habit

The baths are not a spa treatment here but a routine: people play chess in the water at Szechenyi, pensioners hold season tickets, and doctors prescribe courses of thermal treatment that the health system pays for.

Formality and directness

Greetings are formal — surnames come first in Hungarian, and titles matter — while opinions are delivered bluntly. Hungarians are famously and cheerfully pessimistic about their own country, and visitors are not expected to join in.

• Central Hungary
• Great Plains
• Northern Hungary
• Transdanubia

Budapest absorbs the great majority of Hungary’s visitors, and the ruin bars of District VII have produced a genuine conflict with the people who live above them. Noise regulations exist and are contested; keeping it down after midnight in residential streets is the least a visitor can do.

The rest of the country sees very little of that traffic, and spending a night in Eger, Pecs or a Balaton village rather than day-tripping from the capital makes a real difference to those economies.

Thermal baths have rules that are about hygiene rather than ceremony: shower before entering, wear a cap where one is required, and note that some pools are medicinal and time-limited for good reason.

Tipping matters here. Wages in hospitality are low, and ten per cent is expected rather than generous — check whether a service charge has already been added before adding another.

May, June and September are the best months: warm without the summer heat, long days, and the festival calendar running. Spring arrives late and quickly.

July and August are hot, frequently above 32°C, and Budapest empties as Hungarians go to Balaton, which fills completely. It is also festival season — Sziget on an island in the Danube in August is one of Europe’s largest.

October brings the grape harvest and the best colour of the year in the hills. November to February is cold, grey and often below freezing, with Christmas markets in December and a real appeal to the thermal baths when there is snow on the ground and steam coming off the water.

March and April are unsettled and cheap. Note that many Balaton businesses close entirely from October to April.

What a day costs, by how you travel

Relative cost across the country

Hungary is considerably cheaper than western Europe, though Budapest’s tourist centre is no longer the bargain it was. The set lunch menu, offered by most restaurants on weekdays, is the single best value in the country.