From Heroes' Square to the Zoo: A Half Day in City Park

Many visitors to Budapest never get as far as the park at the end of Andrássy út. This walk goes there and stays. Most of what it passes began with the celebrations of 1896, when Hungary marked a thousand years since the Magyar settlement of the Carpathian Basin, and later added to.

The route runs from the two galleries on Heroes' Square to a copy of a Transylvanian castle, then to the thermal bath and the zoo. Most of the stops can be walked around for free, and a few are worth going into, so leave room for one or two of them.

Start on the north side of the square, at the Museum of Fine Arts. Albert Schickedanz and Fülöp Herzog designed the neoclassical building, which opened in 1906. The collection behind it was put together from aristocratic and royal holdings.

The Old Masters are the reason to go in: Italian paintings by Raphael and Titian, and Bruegel's Sermon of St. John the Baptist. There is also a large Egyptian collection. The museum reopened in 2018 after a three-year renovation that returned the Romanesque Hall to visitors for the first time in more than seventy years.

Walk to the middle of Heroes' Square. A tall column carries the archangel Gabriel, who in the story of St. Stephen offered the Hungarian crown, and at its foot stand seven equestrian statues of the Magyar chieftains, with Árpád among them. The festivities of 1896 were held a year late; the monument grew over the following years, and the curved colonnades behind it, with statues of Hungarian kings and leaders, were built between 1905 and 1911.

The square is part of the area of Andrássy út listed by UNESCO in 2002.

The long hall opposite the museum is the Palace of Art, known in Hungarian as the Műcsarnok. It opened on 4 May 1896, and it still does what it was built for: temporary exhibitions of art, around twenty to twenty-five a year, with the focus on contemporary artists.

The building is a good reason to cross the square even if you do not go in. For its 130th anniversary in 2026 a panel exhibition on its history is shown outdoors, on the Bajza utca side.

Behind the square lies City Park, in Hungarian Városliget, the largest green space in Budapest. Entry is free, and there are no gates to find. The lake in the middle is used for boating in summer and turns into an outdoor ice rink in winter.

The park is where the 1896 exhibition stood, and its old pavilions are why it feels like a collection of small set pieces, not one landscape. Take the paths towards the lake.

Beside the lake stands the Gatehouse Tower of Vajdahunyad Castle. The castle was designed by Ignác Alpár for the 1896 exhibition as a set of copies of buildings from across the old Kingdom of Hungary, above all Hunyad Castle in Transylvania, which gave it its name. It began as wood and cardboard and was rebuilt in brick and stone, finishing by 1908.

That is why one courtyard runs through Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque in a few steps. The grounds and courtyards are free to walk, and part of the complex is the Museum of Hungarian Agriculture.

Continue north through the park to the Széchenyi Thermal Bath. It opened in 1913 in Neo-Baroque style, to a design by Győző Czigler, and was enlarged in 1927 when the outdoor pools were added. It is named after the nineteenth-century statesman István Széchenyi.

The bath is being renovated in phases and is reported to stay open during the works, so check its website before you plan to swim.

A short stroll west ends the walk at the Budapest Zoo & Botanical Garden, which opened in 1866 and turns 160 this year. After the city took it over in 1907 it was almost completely rebuilt between 1909 and 1912, and the Art Nouveau buildings of that rebuilding are the reason to come here even if you only want to look at the architecture, among them the Elephant House, restored and reopened in 1999.

The zoo is open every day of the year.

What links the seven stops is that they all belong to one summer of 1896 and its afterlife, a nation's birthday party that its architects chose to keep.