Classic Budapest Walk

Now look at the yellow building on the square's northeast corner. That is Café Gerbeaud, and if you walk in tomorrow morning and order a coffee, you'll be sitting in a Hungarian institution that has been pouring coffee on this exact spot since eighteen fifty-eight. Henrik Kugler opened the first café here, and in eighteen eighty-four it was taken over by Émile Gerbeaud, a Swiss master confectioner who introduced Budapest to the modern European dessert. Gerbeaud invented the konyakmeggy, the cognac cherry, which is essentially a chocolate-covered cherry soaked in brandy. He also created the Zserbó cake, a layered walnut-and-apricot-jam bar that every Hungarian grandmother still makes at Christmas. Inside, the interior is pure belle époque, with chandeliers, marble tables, and a bar that looks like it was set-dressed for a Wes Anderson film.

Across the square to the west is the Vigadó concert hall, completed in eighteen sixty-five in a style called Hungarian Romantic Nationalism, which is what happens when architects are told to invent a national style from scratch. Liszt played here. Wagner conducted here. Richard Strauss premiered work here. The building you see today is actually a nineteen eighty restoration, because the original was destroyed during the siege of Budapest in World War Two and then left as a ruin for thirty-five years under the Communists.

Here's a fact that will orient you. Budapest is actually two cities. Buda, on the hilly western side of the Danube, and Pest, on the flat eastern side, were separate towns until eighteen seventy-three, when they were merged along with a third town called Óbuda to form the single capital we know today. You are currently in Pest. Everything on this side of the river is Pest. The hill with the castle on it, over there across the water? That's Buda. We'll be walking that way in about an hour.

Our route today follows the classic Pest-to-Buda arc. We'll walk north to Saint Stephen's Basilica, then to Liberty Square, then up to the Parliament building, down along the Danube to a very quiet memorial of sixty iron shoes, across the Chain Bridge into Buda, up to the Royal Castle, to Matthias Church, and we'll finish at Fisherman's Bastion just in time for the parliament to light up across the river. It's about four kilometres, two and a half hours, and most of it is flat until the last fifteen minutes.

When you're ready, walk north out of the square. Váci utca, the main pedestrian street, heads south from here — ignore it. Instead, face the Vörösmarty statue, walk past Café Gerbeaud on your right, cross Deák Ferenc utca, and continue straight ahead onto Október 6. utca. That's a narrow pedestrian street lined with boutiques and cafés. Follow it north for about four hundred metres. It leads straight to the front steps of Saint Stephen's Basilica.

Now, the basilica itself. Construction began in eighteen fifty-one. It took fifty-four years to build, because halfway through, in eighteen sixty-eight, the dome collapsed during a storm. The entire design had to be restarted from the foundation up, under a new architect, Miklós Ybl. It was finally consecrated in nineteen oh five, fifty-four years after the first stone was laid.

Look up at the dome. It's exactly ninety-six metres tall. Now walk ten minutes north and look at the Parliament dome, and you'll notice something. That dome is also exactly ninety-six metres tall. This is not a coincidence. Until twenty nineteen, Budapest had a law that no building in the city was permitted to exceed ninety-six metres. Why? Because ninety-six is the sacred Hungarian number. The Magyar tribes arrived in the Carpathian Basin in the year eight ninety-five, and nineteen hundred years later, in eighteen ninety-six, Hungary celebrated its one-thousandth birthday. The whole city was rebuilt for that millennium celebration, and the ninety-six-metre rule was a permanent architectural handshake between Saint Stephen's, the religious centre of the nation, and the Parliament, the political centre. Equal in height. Equal in dignity. Church and state, balanced.

Now, the reason to go inside. Behind the main altar, in a chapel called the Szent Jobb Kápolna, is a silver-and-glass reliquary. Inside that reliquary is the Holy Right Hand, the mummified right hand of Saint Stephen himself. It has been preserved for over nine hundred years. This is not a replica. This is not a bone fragment. This is the actual hand of Hungary's first king, with the skin still on it, fingers visibly intact.

The story of how it survived is almost comically dramatic. After Stephen was buried, his tomb was opened by his son, and the right hand was found to be miraculously incorruptible. It was kept as a relic in various monasteries, eventually carried to Ragusa, which is modern-day Dubrovnik, for safekeeping during the Turkish occupation. It didn't return to Hungary until seventeen seventy-one, and it's been in Budapest ever since. On the twentieth of August every year, Saint Stephen's Day, the hand is paraded through the streets in a national procession watched by hundreds of thousands of people.

To see the hand, go inside, walk left around the main altar, and look for the small chapel. You'll need to insert a two-hundred-forint coin into a machine next to the reliquary, and a light will switch on inside, illuminating the hand for about two minutes. It's one of the strangest and most memorable moments you can have in Budapest.

For a few forints more, you can climb or take the lift to the dome, where the panoramic view stretches from the Parliament building to Castle Hill. Best at sunset.

When you're done here, walk back down the basilica steps and head around the north side of the church. Take Bank utca west for one block, then turn right onto Hold utca and walk north. After about two hundred metres Hold utca opens onto a large leafy square with a grand stone obelisk in the middle. That's our next stop.

During the Hungarian Revolution of eighteen forty-eight, the Neugebäude became a prison. And on the sixth of October, eighteen forty-nine, the Austrian authorities executed Count Lajos Batthyány, who had been Hungary's first democratically elected prime minister during the revolution. He was shot right here on this ground. Look for the eternal flame at the southern edge of the square. That's his memorial. Every year on the sixth of October, Hungarians gather at that flame to honour the thirteen generals and hundreds of officers who were also executed during the Habsburg reprisals.

After the barracks were demolished, the square was turned into a public park and renamed Szabadság tér, Liberty Square, in eighteen ninety-seven.

Now, walk to the centre of the square and look at the tall stone obelisk with the Soviet hammer-and-sickle emblem on top. This is the Soviet War Memorial, erected in nineteen forty-five to commemorate the eighty thousand Soviet soldiers who died fighting the Nazis in the Siege of Budapest. Hungary was a reluctant Axis ally under the regent Miklós Horthy, and by the winter of nineteen forty-four, the Red Army had reached the city. The siege lasted fifty days. It was one of the bloodiest urban battles of the entire war. The Soviets liberated Budapest from the Nazis, but then occupied the country for the next forty-five years.

Most Soviet monuments across Eastern Europe were torn down after nineteen eighty-nine. This one stayed, partly because of a clause in the nineteen ninety-one treaty with Russia that obligated Hungary to maintain it. So it remains, a genuinely strange relic in the middle of post-communist Budapest.

Now turn around and face away from the obelisk, looking south. You'll see a life-sized bronze statue of a man walking purposefully towards the Soviet memorial. That's Ronald Reagan, unveiled here in twenty eleven. The statue faces the obelisk deliberately, as if Reagan is still marching to tear it down. It's a direct reference to his nineteen eighty-seven speech at the Brandenburg Gate: "Mister Gorbachev, tear down this wall." The juxtaposition is the whole joke, and the whole point.

Now look at the yellow Art Nouveau building on the eastern side of the square. That's the Hungarian National Bank, designed by Ignác Alpár and completed in nineteen oh five. Absolute masterpiece of Hungarian Secession architecture. If you like gargoyles, caryatids, and bees, look up.

One more thing. The building at the far southern end is the former United States Embassy, where Cardinal József Mindszenty, the Archbishop of Esztergom, took refuge after the failed nineteen fifty-six uprising. He lived inside the embassy, unable to leave, for fifteen years. Fifteen years. Technically a diplomatic guest, effectively a prisoner of geopolitics, until the Americans finally negotiated his exit in nineteen seventy-one.

Alright. Soviet monument, Reagan walking towards it, Batthyány flame where the Habsburgs shot the prime minister, the bank built during the empire, the embassy that hid the cardinal. Every object on this square is arguing with every other object.

When you're ready, exit the square on its northwest corner onto Aulich utca and walk west. You'll emerge in two blocks at a vast plaza dominated by what is, by any measure, the most theatrical parliament building in the world.

There are six hundred and ninety-one rooms inside. Twenty-nine staircases. Twenty-seven entrances. Ten courtyards. Forty kilograms of twenty-two-and-twenty-three-karat gold were used in the interior decoration, mostly in the dome and the main staircase. Eighty-eight statues of Hungarian rulers and historical figures line the exterior.

Now, the style. This is Neo-Gothic, and it was a deliberate choice. When Steindl won the design competition in eighteen eighty-three, Hungary was a junior partner in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, politically subordinate to Vienna. But the parliament was meant to assert that Hungary was an ancient, sovereign European nation. So Steindl chose a style that invoked Westminster and the medieval Hungarian kingdom. There is a nod to Renaissance too, in the dome, which references Hungary's brief Renaissance golden age under King Matthias Corvinus in the fifteenth century.

Let's talk about what's inside, because it's important. Since the year two thousand, the Holy Crown of Hungary has been displayed under the central dome of this building. The crown is old — some historians believe it dates to the eleventh century, possibly with elements from the time of King Stephen himself, making it one of the oldest royal crowns in Europe that is still intact. The crown has a famously crooked cross on top, bent in an accident centuries ago, never straightened. The Hungarian coat of arms shows the crown with the crooked cross, the bent version, as a mark of authenticity and continuity. Tourists can visit the crown as part of the guided tour of the building, but you have to book ahead because space is very limited.

Now, turn and face the river. Look at the stone wall to your right as you face the Danube. See those indentations? Bullet holes. Real ones. They are from the twenty-fifth of October, nineteen fifty-six, a day remembered as Bloody Thursday.

During the nineteen fifty-six Hungarian Uprising, thousands of peaceful demonstrators gathered here on Kossuth tér calling for the end of Soviet occupation. Soviet tanks had pulled back earlier that morning, creating an atmosphere of cautious celebration. Then, around the time the crowd reached its peak, someone opened fire. Hungarian state security police, known as the ÁVH, positioned on the rooftops of these government buildings, began shooting into the crowd. Soviet tanks across the square, hearing gunfire, thought they were under attack and opened fire too. The result was a chaotic slaughter. The official death count is around seventy-five, but some estimates put the number at several hundred. Hundreds more were wounded.

The bullet holes were deliberately left in the stone when the square was renovated. They are a scar of that day, and a reminder that this building has witnessed Hungary's darkest as well as its brightest moments.

Beautiful fact about this place: every day at the exact moment of sunset, two honour guards perform a flag-lowering ceremony in front of the main parliament entrance. In summer it's around nine pm. In winter, around four. It's quiet, dignified, takes about five minutes, and it's free to watch.

From here, we walk south along the Danube. You'll see a riverside promenade with stone steps down to the water. Follow it for about five hundred metres, heading downstream. On your right, along the water's edge, you'll eventually see a line of small, dark objects just at the edge of the embankment. That's our next stop, and it will be the quietest few minutes of the day.

This is the Shoes on the Danube Bank memorial. It was installed on the sixteenth of April, two thousand and five, the Hungarian national Holocaust Remembrance Day. The sculptor is Gyula Pauer. The concept came from the film director Can Togay. Between them, they created what is arguably the most devastating memorial in Central Europe.

Here's what happened on this spot.

During the final months of the Second World War, from October nineteen forty-four to January nineteen forty-five, Budapest was ruled by a Hungarian fascist party called the Arrow Cross. They were installed by the Nazis after Hungary tried to negotiate a separate peace with the Allies. In that three-month period, the Arrow Cross murdered somewhere between ten and fifteen thousand Jewish residents of Budapest.

One of their preferred methods was to bring small groups of Jews down to the Danube, here and at other points along the river, at night. They would make the victims strip to their underwear and remove their shoes. Leather, in wartime, was an extraordinarily valuable resource. A good pair of shoes could be sold or worn by a soldier. So the victims removed their shoes, and placed them neatly at the edge of the river. Then the Arrow Cross would tie two or three victims together with wire, shoot the first one in the head, and push them all into the Danube. The weight of the shot body dragged the living ones underwater to drown. This saved bullets.

Estimates of how many Jews were killed at the Danube during those three months range from three thousand five hundred to many more. We don't know for certain. There are no records. The killings happened at night. The bodies went downstream.

What you're standing at is not the location of one specific atrocity. It's a symbolic memorial. But the shoes are very specifically nineteen-forties styles, studied from period photographs by Pauer. The casting is precise. Some have laces. Some have buckles. The smallest pair, at the far end, is a child's shoe, maybe a size seven in American measurements. Maybe a four-year-old.

The memorial was designed to be experienced silently. There is no plaque on the shoes themselves. There is one small inscription in Hungarian, English, and Hebrew on a bronze strip set into the embankment, which reads: "To the memory of the victims shot into the Danube by Arrow Cross militiamen in nineteen forty-four to nineteen forty-five. Erected sixteenth of April, two thousand and five."

People leave flowers in the shoes. Sometimes candles. Sometimes small stones, in the Jewish tradition of placing a stone on a grave. The Arrow Cross leadership was tried and hanged after the war. Ferenc Szálasi, the head of the government, was executed in nineteen forty-six. But the city remembers.

Take as long as you need here. When you're ready, continue walking south along the river. After about two hundred metres, the Chain Bridge will come into view on your right. That's our next stop, and our crossing point.

The architects were Zsigmond Quittner and the brothers József and László Vágó. The Hungarian Secession was Hungary's own version of Art Nouveau, related to the Vienna Secession of Gustav Klimt and Josef Hoffmann but with a distinctly Hungarian flavour — folk motifs, peacocks, flowers, bees, and the wild curving ironwork that makes these buildings feel alive.

Look at the iron peacock gates on the main entrance, by Gyula Jungfer. Look at the stained glass inside the lobby, designed by Miksa Róth, Hungary's greatest stained-glass artist. Look at the decorative tiles, all Zsolnay porcelain from the factory in the city of Pécs, which also made the glazed tiles you'll see on the roof of Matthias Church later today. Zsolnay is its own story, but short version: they invented a technique in the eighteen nineties for producing ceramic tiles with a metallic, iridescent glaze called eosin, and they used it to cover roofs across the empire. The tiles are still in production today, and they're weather-proof for centuries.

Gresham Palace survived World War Two, just barely. The ground floor was used as a Soviet barracks during the siege. After the war, the Communist government turned the interior into overcrowded flats, stuffed three hundred families into it, and let the building decay for forty years. By the nineteen eighties it was a derelict tenement with leaking pipes and squatters in the attics.

The rescue came from an Irish real estate developer and the Canadian hotel chain Four Seasons. Between nineteen ninety-nine and two thousand and four, the palace was completely restored. Every stained-glass window was recreated from period photographs. The peacock gates were re-forged. The lobby mosaic was re-laid by hand. The result is one of the finest luxury hotels in Central Europe, the Four Seasons Gresham Palace. The bar on the ground floor, called Kollázs, is open to non-guests, and a cocktail there is a reasonable way to spend an hour of your evening.

Now look across the street. That grey Neoclassical building is the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. It was founded in eighteen twenty-five by Count István Széchenyi, who donated an entire year of his income — roughly sixty thousand silver florins — to establish a national academy for the Hungarian language and sciences. He believed Hungary could not become a modern European nation without institutions of learning. Fifteen years after founding the Academy, the same Count Széchenyi would build the bridge in front of you.

And that bridge is where we are going now. Let's walk.

He couldn't. The Danube was full of drifting ice.

At that time, in eighteen twenty, there was no permanent bridge anywhere on the Danube in Hungary. Crossings were done by ferry, or by a temporary pontoon bridge that was assembled each spring and taken apart each winter to avoid being smashed by the ice. In December, neither worked. Széchenyi waited at the riverbank for eight days, trying to cross. He missed his father's funeral entirely.

He never forgot it. Over the next twenty years, Széchenyi would become the most influential reformer in Hungarian history, pushing the country toward modernisation in industry, language, transport, and finance. And the first and most personal project on his list was this bridge.

He hired the English civil engineer William Tierney Clark, who had already designed the famous suspension bridge at Marlow on the Thames. Clark produced the design in London. Construction began in eighteen thirty-nine. The Scottish engineer Adam Clark — no relation, despite the shared surname — came to Budapest to supervise the build. It took ten years. It opened on the twentieth of November, eighteen forty-nine, as the first permanent bridge between Buda and Pest.

At the time, it was one of the largest suspension bridges in the world. It was also a marvel of democratic infrastructure. Before the Chain Bridge, Hungarian nobles were exempt from paying tolls for crossing the Danube. Széchenyi insisted the new bridge charge everyone the same toll, nobility and commoner alike. This was a genuinely revolutionary thing to legislate. In Hungary, until the bridge opened, aristocratic privilege was literally untouchable. The Chain Bridge was where it started to crumble.

The four stone lions at each end of the bridge were sculpted by János Marschalkó in eighteen fifty-two, and they're a beloved local icon. There's an urban myth, told to every Budapest schoolchild, that the lions have no tongues. The story goes that Marschalkó was so mortified by this oversight at the unveiling ceremony that he threw himself off the bridge into the Danube. This is entirely untrue. The lions do have tongues. You just can't see them well from the street because of the angle. Marschalkó lived to eighteen seventy-seven and died in his bed.

On the eighteenth of January, nineteen forty-five, the retreating German army blew up every bridge across the Danube in Budapest. The Chain Bridge collapsed into the river. All seven bridges in the city were destroyed. The city was effectively split in two. The Chain Bridge was rebuilt in its original form and reopened on the twentieth of November, nineteen forty-nine, exactly one hundred years to the day after its original opening. That's not an accident. Hungarians love that kind of detail.

It got a full renovation from twenty twenty-one to twenty twenty-three, so what you're walking on right now is as good as the original.

Cross the bridge. Walk slowly. It's three hundred and seventy-five metres across. Enjoy it. When you reach the Buda side, you'll see a small square with a stone tunnel entrance directly ahead. Our next stop is right there.

Now, to our left, at the base of the hill, you see the Siklo. The Buda Castle Funicular. A pair of little wooden cable cars, painted in lemon yellow and chocolate brown, climbing up the side of the hill on twin tracks.

The funicular opened in eighteen seventy and was the second funicular to operate in continental Europe, after one in Lyon. It was originally built so that government clerks who worked in the Royal Palace up on the hill could commute from Pest without having to walk up. The entire ride takes ninety-five seconds. The carriages are original wood, restored periodically but faithful to the eighteen seventies design.

You have a choice now. You can take the funicular up to Castle Hill for about a thousand forints. Or you can walk up a zig-zag path called the Király lépcső, the King's Staircase, which takes about fifteen minutes and is genuinely scenic. Or you can walk up a gentler road called Palota út that spirals around the hill. I'd recommend the funicular if it's operating, because it's a piece of living history and it goes directly to our next area.

Castle Hill is Budapest's medieval core. The Royal Palace is at the south end of the hill. The medieval old town of Buda, a maze of narrow streets and pastel-coloured houses, is at the north end. The whole plateau is only about a kilometre long and two hundred metres wide. It's a UNESCO World Heritage Site, along with the Danube banks we just walked along.

Here's the quick history. The hill was first fortified by the Hungarian King Béla the Fourth in the twelve forties, after the Mongol invasion of twelve forty-one burnt Pest to the ground. Béla decided the Hungarian capital needed to be moved somewhere defensible. He chose this hill. A royal residence and a fortified town were built here over the following decades, and for the next eight hundred years, Castle Hill has been the symbolic heart of the Hungarian state.

It's also been sacked repeatedly. The Ottoman Turks captured it in fifteen forty-one and held it for a hundred and forty-five years. The Habsburg army retook it in sixteen eighty-six after a bloody siege that damaged most of the palace. The entire hill was flattened again during the Siege of Budapest in nineteen forty-four and nineteen forty-five. What you're going to see over the next hour is the product of multiple rebuilds, some faithful, some fantastical. Very little of what you'll see is "original" in the medieval sense, but all of it sits on medieval foundations.

Take the funicular or the path up to the top. When you reach the upper station, walk north through the gate and along Szent György tér. Continue north through Dísz tér, then up Tárnok utca. The street will curve and open onto a wide plaza dominated by a church with a spectacular tiled roof. That's where we're headed.

The church itself is much older than Matthias. The original structure dates from around twelve fifty-five, built during the reign of Béla the Fourth as part of his post-Mongol rebuilding. It was substantially expanded in the fourteenth century under King Louis the Great, and then again in the late fifteenth century by Matthias, who added the southern tower. So by fifteen hundred, this was a proper medieval Gothic cathedral, and one of the most important churches in Hungary.

Then the Turks arrived.

In fifteen forty-one, after the Battle of Mohács and two decades of war, the Ottoman Empire captured Buda. The Turks were not interested in destroying the church. They were interested in using it. They whitewashed over the frescoes, removed the Christian art, added a minbar and a mihrab, and converted it into Buda's main mosque. It would serve as a mosque for one hundred and forty-five years.

During the siege of sixteen eighty-six, when the Habsburg army retook Buda, a Turkish cannonball struck the wall of the church and blew open a section of plaster. Behind the plaster, the defenders and the attackers both saw a statue of the Virgin Mary, intact, that the Turks had walled up at the start of the occupation to protect it. The statue had been sealed inside for a hundred and forty-five years. Whether you believe the story literally or metaphorically, it was considered a miracle, and it's known as the Miracle of the Madonna of Buda. It convinced the Turkish defenders that the end was coming. Buda fell to the Habsburgs later that day.

After the reconquest, the church was restored to Catholic use, but it took a while to fix. The current appearance is largely the work of the architect Frigyes Schulek, who undertook a massive restoration between eighteen seventy-four and eighteen ninety-six. Schulek wanted to recreate the church as it might have looked in the fourteenth century, before the Turks, before the Habsburgs, before the decay. He was not afraid to invent when the evidence was thin. So what you're looking at is Gothic, but it's Neo-Gothic, a Victorian romantic reconstruction of what Gothic should look like. The tiled roof was his addition. It was not medieval. But it is spectacular.

The last Hungarian king crowned here was Charles the Fourth, the final Habsburg emperor, on the thirtieth of December, nineteen sixteen. The coronation happened in the middle of World War One. Two years later, the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed, the monarchy was abolished, and Charles died in exile on the island of Madeira in nineteen twenty-two. The crown he wore is now in the Parliament building we visited earlier.

The interior is open to visitors for a small fee, and it's worth going in. The frescoes are mostly late-nineteenth-century Romantic Nationalism, but the architecture is Gothic-perfect, and the Loretto Chapel on the left contains that same Madonna of Buda statue, still here, still watching over the church.

When you're done, walk around the back of the church. You'll emerge on a stone terrace overlooking the river, with spindly white towers rising all around you. That's our last stop, and it's the payoff for everything.

Fisherman's Bastion was built between eighteen ninety-five and nineteen oh two. It is not medieval. It is not a real defensive bastion. It is not a military structure. It was never used to defend anything from anyone.

It is a ceremonial viewing terrace. A piece of urban theatre. It was constructed as part of the celebrations for the one-thousandth anniversary of the Magyar arrival in the Carpathian Basin, the nineteen oh one celebration of the founding of Hungary. The architect was Frigyes Schulek, the same man who rebuilt Matthias Church next door. Schulek designed the bastion in Neo-Romanesque style, meaning it was intentionally built to evoke the architecture of Hungary's earliest medieval period — the tenth and eleventh centuries, the age of Saint Stephen. But the building itself is barely older than your great-grandmother.

The name, Fisherman's Bastion, comes from the medieval guild of fishermen who were historically responsible for defending this section of Castle Hill's walls. In the Middle Ages, Buda's fish market was on this exact stretch, and the fishermen were required to maintain the fortifications directly above their market. So there was once a real defensive wall here, manned by real fishermen. But what you're standing in now is a later memorial to that idea, not the thing itself.

Count the towers. There are seven. This is the most important detail. The seven towers represent the seven Magyar tribes who, in the year eight ninety-five, under the leadership of the chieftain Árpád, crossed the Carpathian mountains and settled in the Pannonian Basin. Those seven tribes — the Nyék, the Megyer, the Kürtgyarmat, the Tarján, the Jenő, the Kér, and the Keszi — are the founding peoples of Hungary, and every town, street, and institution in the country carries echoes of them. The Megyer tribe is where the word Magyar comes from. The word Hungarian comes from a different source, probably Turkic, possibly related to the Onogur confederation that the Magyars were part of before they arrived.

Eight ninety-five. Look at the number. Now recall that Saint Stephen's dome is ninety-six metres tall, and the Parliament dome is ninety-six metres tall. Eighteen ninety-six was Hungary's thousandth birthday. The whole city, as you've seen it today — the basilica, the parliament, this bastion, the Opera House on Andrássy, the monuments on Heroes' Square — all of it was built or completed for that millennium. Budapest is a city that was reinvented all at once, in one burst of national pride, in the last decade of the nineteenth century. What you've walked through today is that birthday celebration, solid and permanent, still standing.

Now, the view. Face east across the Danube. In the foreground, the river. Directly opposite, on the far bank, the Parliament building. To the right, downstream, the Chain Bridge you crossed. To the left, upstream, the Margaret Bridge and Margaret Island. Beyond, the whole of Pest, stretching east into the flat plains of the Great Hungarian Plain.

If it's anywhere near sunset, the parliament will light up in about twenty minutes. It glows in a colour that Hungarians call "paprika gold." Trust me. Stay for it.

The cafe here, Halászbástya Étterem, is overpriced but the view is unmatched. If you're not willing to pay tourist prices for a coffee, walk back down to the Fortuna utca and the medieval streets of Buda's old town, where there are perfectly good local places.

And that's your Budapest walk. Thank you for letting me guide you. Welcome to Hungary.