Free walking tours in Budapest

1. Morning

   Essential Budapest: Castle Hill

   Essentials · 1.8 km · 1 h 40 min

   1. Matthias ChurchRoyal weddings, a century and a half as a mosque and a ceramic roof that glitters like fish scales.
   2. Fisherman's BastionIt looks like a medieval fortress, but it's a lookout built in 1902 for gazing at the Danube.
   3. Sándor PalaceThe Hungarian president's residence, where a prime minister took his own life in 1941 rather than break his word.
   4. Buda Royal PalaceDestroyed and rebuilt again and again: the palace of Hungary's kings is the city's great survivor.
   5. Chain BridgeThe first permanent bridge between Buda and Pest, born of Széchenyi's stubbornness and guarded by four lions with a legend.

2. Afternoon

   Budapest from 1849 to 1989: the Pest Embankment

   History · 2.4 km · 2 h

   1. Hungarian Academy of SciencesA palace born of a single gesture: the day a young count gave a whole year's income so that Hungarian could have a science of its own.
   2. Shoes on the Danube BankSixty pairs of iron shoes at the water's edge: Budapest's simplest and most harrowing memorial.
   3. Parliament and Kossuth SquareHungary's largest building, conceived for the nation's millennium, and a square that ran with blood in 1956.
   4. Batthyány Eternal FlameA flame that never goes out, on the corner where Hungary's first prime minister was shot.
   5. Liberty SquareBudapest's most contradictory square: a Soviet obelisk, a bronze American president and a cardinal who lived fifteen years inside an embassy.
   6. St Stephen's BasilicaHalf a century of building work, a dome that collapsed and a church exactly as tall as Parliament.

3. Early evening

   Witches' Hill: Legends of Gellért Hill

   Mysteries & legends · 2 km · 1 h 45 min

   1. Contra-Aquincum and Pest's Oldest ChurchUnder a sheet of glass, the walls of a Roman fort; beside it, a church that was once a mosque and, by tradition, once held a martyr's grave.
   2. St Gerard's Statue and the Witches' HillA bishop who, legend says, was hurled down the hillside, and a hill that for centuries was said to draw the witches of Hungary.
   3. Rudas BathsA 16th-century Ottoman dome over hot springs that were rising from the hill long before the city existed.
   4. Cave ChurchA church carved into the hill, which the communist police walled up behind concrete in 1951.
   5. Liberty BridgeA green bridge from 1896 crowned by four turul birds, the bird of the dream that, legend says, foretold the Árpád dynasty.

Where to eat. Try Goulash (gulyás) at Százéves Étterem.