City Park (Városliget), Vajdahunyad Castle and the House of Music

Immediately behind the colonnades of Heroes' Square spreads City Park (Városliget), a 100-hectare public park created in the early 19th century on former marshland and reshaped for the 1896 Millennium Exhibition. Over the last decade the park has undergone a huge architectural transformation (the Liget Budapest project), pairing its 1896 fairytale castle and Széchenyi Thermal Bath with two of the most imaginative modern museum buildings in Central Europe.

Vajdahunyad Castle and the lake

Cross the bridge from Heroes' Square onto the artificial island holding Vajdahunyad Castle (Vajdahunyad vára). Originally built of wood and cardboard for the 1896 exhibition as a walk-through catalogue of a thousand years of Hungarian architecture, and proved so popular with locals that architect Ignác Alpár rebuilt it in permanent stone and brick by 1908, the complex stitches together a Romanesque cloister and church portal (modeled on Ják Abbey), a tall Gothic castle wing copied from Corvin Castle in Transylvania, and an ornate Renaissance-Baroque palace overlooking the water.

Walking through the castle courtyards and visiting the tiny Ják Chapel are completely free; inside the Baroque wing sits the Museum of Hungarian Agriculture (ticketed). In the courtyard, look for the bronze hooded statue of Anonymus, the unknown 12th-century chronicler of King Béla III; tradition says touching the tip of his bronze pen brings writing skill and good luck. From spring to autumn you can rent rowboats and pedalos on the surrounding lake; from late November to February the drained basin is flooded and chilled into the City Park Ice Rink (Városligeti Műjégpálya), open since 1870.

House of Music Hungary (Magyar Zene Háza)

A five-minute walk west through the trees brings you to Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto's House of Music Hungary, opened in 2022. Its undulating white roof is pierced by dozens of circular light wells through which park trees grow right up to the sky, while its underside shimmers with thousands of golden metal leaves and an uninterrupted 12-metre-high glass wall erases the boundary between park and lobby. Downstairs, an interactive permanent exhibition takes you through European and Hungarian musical history using position-sensing headphones that fade instruments in and out as you walk from the Hungarian folk hearth to Liszt, Bartók and the 360-degree Sound Dome (book timed exhibition tickets ahead on the official site).

The Museum of Ethnography and balloon lookout

Along the western edge of the park on Dózsa György út stands the Museum of Ethnography (Néprajzi Múzeum), designed as two giant curving wings that dip into the ground like a skateboard half-pipe. Even if you do not visit the indoor folk-culture galleries, you can walk up the landscaped rooftop garden for free via the outside stairs for views back toward Heroes' Square. Deeper in the park, a tethered red-and-white striped gas balloon (BallonKilátó) rises 150 metres into the air on calm, windless days.