This week’s travel dream: Beautiful, moody Budapest

“Budapest is so abundant in its gifts” that anyone just passing through “would wish to return at once,” said Michael Watts in Condé Nast Traveller (U.K.). While new hotels and office complexes are subtly changing the streetscape, “nothing can disguise the physical beauty” of Hungary’s capital. Magnificent 19th-century bridges crossing the Danube connect the once-separate cities of Buda and Pest, and “a feast of architectural styles” greets the eye, from Gothic to Renaissance to baroque and neoclassical. Yet most intriguing to me is the spirit of the people—“disarmingly self-deprecating once they’ve warmed up,” a “shade gloomy,” and quick to poke fun at their turbulent history.

To know Budapest, “you must first visit the baths.” Thermal springs are abundant in Hungary, and there are spas and baths in virtually every city, “often masterpieces of design.” The art nouveau Gellert in Buda is understandably a big draw for foreigners, though you’ll find a more gregarious crowd of bathers at the “thoroughly modernized” Szechenyi Bath in City Park. Tourists usually flock to Buda’s Castle Hill, an area of medieval and baroque houses along the Danube. But I prefer more cosmopolitan Pest, especially for its nightlife. Every summer, bars and nightclubs called “ruin pubs” pop up in the gardens and courtyards of abandoned buildings, serving drinks in plastic cups and sometimes featuring films or artwork.

It’s impossible to visit Hungary “without thinking of its doomed history.” Occupied by the Ottomans for centuries, the country backed the wrong sides in World Wars I and II, then endured Soviet repression until 1989. Now that “brutish legacy of communist dictatorship can be seen in a very odd theme park” on the outskirts of Budapest. Memento Park is the last resting ground of various statues of Lenin and busts of Marx that the city’s plucky residents pulled down after the Iron Curtain fell. Near a pair of gigantic bronze boots—all that’s left from a statue of Stalin—sits a small, broken-down Trabant, a notoriously underpowered Soviet-era car. To be honest: “Much about present-day Hungary seems satirical.”

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Doubles at the Four Seasons Hotel Gresham Palace Budapest (fourseasons.com/budapest) start at $337.