Hungary Geography & Climate

Hungary is a landlocked country of about 93,000 square kilometres in the Carpathian Basin, ringed at a distance by mountains that lie mostly in its neighbours. Its own terrain is gentle: around two thirds is below 200 metres and the highest point, Kekes, reaches only 1,014 metres.

The Great Plain

The Alfold covers the eastern half of the country — flat, fertile and treeless, the western edge of the Eurasian steppe. Part of it, the Hortobagy, is a UNESCO World Heritage site as a cultural landscape: grassland grazed for two thousand years, with grey cattle, racka sheep and a horse-herding tradition still practised.

The Danube and the Tisza

The Danube enters from Slovakia, turns sharply south at the Danube Bend north of Budapest, and cuts the country in two. The Tisza runs parallel through the east. Both have flooded severely and are heavily engineered.

Lake Balaton

The largest lake in central Europe at 592 square kilometres, and very shallow — averaging three metres — which makes it warm enough to swim from June to September. Volcanic hills on the northern shore produce wine and give the lake its distinctive basalt buttes.

Hills and caves

The Bakony, Matra and Bukk uplands run across the north, with the Aggtelek karst on the Slovak border holding one of the largest cave systems in Europe, also UNESCO-listed.

Water underground

Hungary sits on one of the richest thermal aquifers in the world. More than a thousand springs produce hot mineral water, over a hundred of them in Budapest alone, which is the reason the country baths the way it does.

Hungary has a continental climate with four clearly marked seasons and a wide annual range, tempered slightly by Atlantic and Mediterranean influences that reach it from the west and south.

Summer

June to August is warm to hot, with July and August averaging highs around 27°C and regularly exceeding 32°C. Heatwaves in the Great Plain and in Budapest, where the built-up area holds warmth overnight, are the main discomfort. Thunderstorms break the heat and are often violent.

Winter

December to February hovers around freezing, with overcast skies for weeks at a time and periodic falls of snow that rarely lie long in the lowlands. Cold snaps below −10°C happen most winters. This is the season the thermal baths are best.

Spring and autumn

Both are short. Spring arrives late and suddenly in April; autumn is the more reliable of the two, with warm, clear weather often lasting into mid-October and the best light of the year over the vineyards.

Rainfall

Modest and fairly even, between 500 and 750 millimetres a year, with a late-spring maximum. The Great Plain is the driest part of the country and has a genuine drought problem, which is worsening.

Fog and inversions

From late autumn into winter the Carpathian Basin traps cold air under a lid of warmer air above, and the result is days or weeks of freezing fog over Budapest and the plain while the hills a few hundred metres higher sit in sunshine. It is the single most demoralising feature of a Hungarian winter and the reason the Matra and Bukk uplands fill at weekends in January.

The Balaton effect

The lake moderates its own shoreline, keeping the northern hills slightly warmer in autumn — which is precisely why the wine is grown there.