Attractions

A UNESCO-listed 2.3-kilometre boulevard of Neo-Renaissance mansions and the Opera House, running above continental Europe's first underground railway.

The sprawling royal palace crowning Castle Hill, rebuilt after Ottoman siege and wartime ruin, now home to the Hungarian National Gallery and sweeping views over the Danube.

Budapest's first permanent Danube crossing, a mid-19th-century suspension bridge guarded by four stone lions that first physically united Buda and Pest.

A fairy-tale neo-Romanesque terrace of seven white turrets above the Castle District, built purely for the view rather than defence, overlooking the Danube and Parliament.

A 235-metre hilltop crowned by a Habsburg-built fortress and the towering Liberty Statue, offering Budapest's single best panoramic view over the Danube.

Budapest's most opulent Art Nouveau bathing palace, closed for a multi-year structural renovation until 2028 but still striking from the outside.

Budapest's largest and oldest covered market, an 1897 steel-framed hall with a Zsolnay-tiled roof selling paprika, salami and pickles below a gallery of street food and folk crafts.

Europe's largest synagogue, a Moorish Revival landmark from 1859 that adjoins the Jewish Museum and a Holocaust memorial garden of mass graves and a weeping-willow monument.

A monumental millennial-era square centred on a column honouring the Magyar chieftains, flanked by colonnades of Hungarian kings and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

A former Arrow Cross and secret-police headquarters turned unflinching museum of fascist and communist-era torture, deportation and show trials.

A neoclassical museum spanning prehistory to the 20th century, founded on a count's donated library and famous as the steps where the 1848 revolution was sparked.

Europe's third-largest legislative building, a Gothic Revival riverfront landmark guarding the thousand-year-old Crown of St Stephen beneath its gilded central dome.

A gilded 1884 Neo-Renaissance opera house, deliberately built smaller than Vienna's but acoustically among Europe's best, freshly restored to its original splendour in 2022.

A car-free 2.5-kilometre river island with a musical fountain, rose garden and medieval convent ruins, named for the princess who once lived there as a nun.

A 700-year-old Gothic parish church with a dazzling diamond-patterned tile roof, twice a coronation site for Habsburg kings and once converted into an Ottoman mosque.

An open-air exile for roughly 40 monumental Lenin, Marx and Soviet-hero statues removed from Budapest's streets after 1989, arranged with deliberate irony on a former farm.

Hungary's state collection of foreign art facing Heroes' Square, built on an Esterházy princely collection and holding one of the finest Spanish painting collections outside Spain.

A 16th-century Ottoman Turkish bath with an octagonal domed pool hall lit by star-shaped skylights, plus a rooftop panoramic pool over the Danube.

Sixty pairs of cast-iron period shoes on the riverbank near Parliament, memorialising the Jews shot into the Danube by Arrow Cross militiamen in 1944-45.

Budapest's largest church, sharing the city's maximum 96-metre building height with Parliament and home to the mummified right hand of Hungary's first king.

Europe's largest thermal bathing complex, an opulent neo-baroque palace of outdoor and indoor pools fed by hot springs at the edge of City Park.

The original ruin bar, a derelict Jewish Quarter apartment building filled with flea-market furniture and street art that launched Budapest's whole 'romkocsma' scene.

A fantastical patchwork castle in City Park stitching together replicas of 20 Hungarian landmark buildings, built for the 1896 millennial exhibition and later rebuilt to last.