Budapest
Hungary's capital, the Pearl of the Danube
Budapest straddles the Danube as two cities in one. On the west bank, hilly Buda climbs to a royal castle and ramparts overlooking the river, while on the flat east bank, bustling Pest spreads out around the great domed Parliament and grand nineteenth-century boulevards. Eight bridges stitch the halves together, and beneath the whole city bubble the thermal springs that feed its grand bathhouses. Capital of Hungary and the largest city in central Europe between Vienna and the Black Sea, it is a metropolis of nearly two million.
The city sits where the Danube cuts between the Buda hills and the start of the Great Hungarian Plain, with hilly Buda rising on the west to János Hill at 527 metres and flat Pest spreading across lowland to the east at around 100 metres. The river, running through the center, is the city's spine and its UNESCO-listed showpiece. A continental climate brings hot summers and cold winters, and the geology — a fracture line in the bedrock — gives Budapest its abundance of hot mineral springs.
The Romans built Aquincum on the Buda side, and medieval Buda and Pest grew as separate towns under Hungarian kings and Ottoman occupiers before the two, with Óbuda, were unified into a single capital in 1873. The city flourished as a co-capital of Austria-Hungary, endured a brutal siege in 1945 and the crushed uprising of 1956, and emerged after 1989 as a vibrant European capital. Today Budapest is Hungary's political and cultural heart and one of the Danube's most beautiful cities.